M. Reali-Elliott's Blog

In our modern age, a virtue that has fallen largely out of fashion is that of temperance. Once considered a cornerstone of moral wisdom and self‑discipline, temperance now sounds quaint, even oppressive, in a culture that prizes speed, indulgence, and the immediate satisfaction of every desire.

Meanwhile, we have enshrined a different word: tolerance. We praise it reflexively. We apologize for lacking it. We build entire moral frameworks around it. And yet G.K. Chesterton’s warning hangs in the air: “Tolerance is the virtue of people who do not believe in anything.” When tolerance becomes our highest good, conviction becomes a vice.

Set those two words side by side—temperance and tolerance—and you can feel the fault line that runs straight through our age. One assumes there is a right order to things, and that our desires need shaping to fit it. The other assumes that the worst thing we could do is interfere.

From Temperance to Tolerance: What Changed

Historically, temperance was not a niche personality trait. Emerging from the moral philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, it was named as one of the four cardinal virtues—a call to live in proportion, in harmony with reason and the natural order. The early Church received and baptized this understanding, seeing in moderation not mere self‑denial, but the wise orchestration of our passions under the care of God.

Temperance, in that older view, is not about repressing desire but refining it. It names the difference between being driven by appetite and being able to direct it. It assumes that what we want is not automatically right simply because we feel it strongly.

We, however, were catechized by different slogans: “Listen to your heart.” “Follow your dreams.” “You have one life, don’t waste it.” None of these lines are monstrous on their own. Taken together, over time, they function like a permission slip: if you feel something strongly enough, it must be true; if it hurts to deny it, denying it must be wrong. Anyone who gets in the way of that is recast as an obstacle instead of a neighbor.

This is where tolerance, in its modern sense, takes over. If the self is sovereign and desire is self‑authenticating, the only moral duty left is non‑interference. You do you. Live your truth. No judgment. Temperance quietly exits the stage.

Temperance and Time

There is a reason temperance and time are etymological cousins. Both trace back to the Latin tempus. To live temperately is to live in right relation to time—to resist the demand for immediacy, to accept sequence, to let things ripen. Cicero compared temperate behavior to time itself: neither rushing ahead nor lagging behind, but moving according to an order beyond our moods.

That connection matters in a culture that worships speed and instant gratification. We check, swipe, consume, and react at a pace that makes deliberation feel like a moral failure. If it takes more than a moment to think through, we suspect it’s inauthentic.

Temperance pushes back. It teaches us to live at the tempo of wisdom rather than impulse. It insists that we are not reliable narrators of our own stories in real time, especially when we are in pain. It requires us to subject our immediate feelings to an eternal vantage point, to ask what this choice will mean stretched out over years instead of hours.

The blacksmith tempering steel understands this. The metal is cycled through heat and cooling until it can bear tension without snapping, impact without shattering. The chocolatier tempers chocolate so that its structure is stable, not streaked and crumbly. In neither case is the substance destroyed. It is strengthened, made fit for a purpose.

So with the soul. Temperance is God taking our hunger—sexual, emotional, relational, the hunger to feel seen, to feel alive—and running it through real seasons of heat and delay. The late‑night loneliness. The midlife restlessness. The quiet resentment when your spouse falls asleep and you lie awake, scrolling, thinking, Is this it? The invisibility, the unresolved conversations, the dull ache of unrealized dreams.

These are the places you want to crack. Call the coworker. Reply to the message. Book the trip. Start the secret life. “I deserve this” begins to sound like doctrine. Temperance is simply the refusal to sign that contract. Not because you feel holy in the moment, but because you have learned, painfully, that your feelings at 11:47 p.m. are not trustworthy editors of your entire life.

Midlife Crisis in a Culture of Tolerance

The midlife crises that plague our age are not random storms; they are symptoms of a culture that has traded temperance for tolerance and then asked the self to carry a weight it was never meant to bear.

By forty‑something or fifty‑something, the gap between the life you imagined and the life you have becomes undeniable. You look around at your actual existence—spouse, kids, house, aging parents, groceries, inbox—and it feels like someone swapped scripts on you. You were going to be interesting, desired, impactful. Instead, you are in a minivan in a Target parking lot, Googling “Am I having a midlife crisis.”

In that mood, you become a terrible editor of your own story. You magnify every disappointment and minimize every steady, boring faithfulness. You tell yourself, “I missed my chance.” “I settled.” “My spouse doesn’t really see me.” “If I don’t make a move now, I will die like this.” A three‑month emotional affair begins to feel more honest than a twenty‑year marriage. Fantasies get baptized as “clarity.”

In a culture of unchecked tolerance, the script that meets you there is predictable: live your truth. You deserve to be happy. You can’t pour from an empty cup. The only real sin is to “stay stuck” where you are.

Temperance is the voice that says: we are not rewriting the entire story at 3 a.m. from inside one chapter. We are not making covenant‑level decisions from inside a nervous breakdown. You may very well need change, repentance, hard conversations, outside help—but you do not need to torch your life to prove you are still alive.

Tolerance Unmoored: Sex, Gender, and “My Truth”

Chesterton’s warning about tolerance is not abstract. You can see it walking around in the sexual revolution, in our approach to gender, and in the way we talk about “my truth.” The latest phase of the sexual revolution only came about because we tolerated the previous ones, midlife crisis affairs included.

The sexual revolution, whatever goods it claimed, unhooked sex from covenant and children and recast it as a field of self‑expression. Consent became the only obvious guardrail. If two adults agree, the assumption has been that everything else is commentary.

We now know better, but we are reluctant to say it out loud. We see the fallout: people quietly gutted, porn as a baseline, bodies treated as consumables, relationships with no muscle for endurance. Women and men both more alone than they expected to be. The fruit does not match the advertisement.

Tolerance is the shield we hold over this. “No judgment.” “Their business.” “As long as they’re happy.” It allows us to avoid asking whether the script itself is defective. Temperance, on the other hand, insists that sex actually does something to you—that it binds, that it wounds, that it forms habits of heart and body—and that consent, while essential, does not magically turn self‑harm into health.

The same pattern shows up in questions of gender and identity. The current creed is that the truest thing about me is how I feel on the inside. The body is recast as suggestion, not gift. History, relationships, even basic categories like male and female are expected to bend around my inner story. The job of the people around me is not to help me discern whether that story is aligned with reality; their job is to affirm it. Anything less is labeled violence.

Again, tolerance is invoked as the highest virtue: if you hesitate, if you ask careful questions, if you are not instantly on board with whatever identity someone claims today, you are intolerant. The assumption underneath is that nothing and no one—God, body, covenant, community, time—has the right to say “no.”

“My truth” slots into that framework seamlessly. It sounds brave, but it often functions as a shield: “My truth” means “You may not interrogate this without attacking me.” The normal human work of discernment—of asking whether my perception accords with reality, whether my motives are clean, whether my choice is wise—is taken off the table.

Temperance refuses that immunity. It asks rude, necessary questions: Is this really your truth, or is it your pain talking? Your boredom? Your fear of aging? Your resentment? Your ego, hungry for one more hit of admiration? What does this choice do to your spouse, your children, your community, your soul? If your future self could sit across from you ten years from now, would they thank you or grieve?

In a culture that worships tolerance, those questions sound like an attack. In reality, they are a form of care.

Tolerance as Refined Neglect

The way we often practice tolerance now is little more than refined neglect. We see a friend sliding into an affair and we say nothing because we “don’t want to judge.” We watch a spouse drink themselves numb every night and call it “a hard season.” We watch teenagers bind their bodies and talk about surgeries and tell ourselves our only job is to affirm.

From a distance, that looks gentle. Up close, it is abandonment with good manners.

Temperance is what makes you willing to break that pattern. It is the inner permission to love someone enough to risk being called intolerant. Not because you enjoy confrontation or think you’re above them, but because you actually believe some things are destructive, and that watching someone walk off a cliff in silence is not compassion.

Chesterton’s line about tolerance is not a clever tweet; it is a warning label. If tolerance, defined as non‑interference, becomes our highest virtue, we will lose the ability to believe anything sturdy enough to suffer for. We will let people do whatever they want so long as we can keep our hands clean and our reputations as “non‑judgmental.”

Temperance as a Different Freedom

In an age of moral relativism and unchecked tolerance, the virtue of temperance offers a different way to be free.

It calls us to submit our desires to a higher authority, to let our longings be disciplined until they look away from themselves toward eternal goods. It is not about repression for its own sake; it is about reordering our affections so that we are no longer dragged around by every craving and crisis. It is an invitation to live at the tempo of wisdom, to allow God to temper us through time so that our lives can actually bear weight.

The sands of time are slipping through our fingers. We do not have endless chances to get this right. Temperance reminds us that our days are numbered, not owed to us, and that the true measure of a life is not how much we can possess or consume, but how well we have learned to live—under authority, in proportion, with desires that no longer demand worship.

In a world that calls that intolerance, we will have to decide which accusation we fear more: being called judgmental by a culture that believes in nothing, or being told we watched quietly while the people in front of us disintegrated and called it freedom.

The written word is still one of mankind’s greatest accomplishments. But long before there were books, there were stories murmured around fires and in caves and repeated across savannahs, tales of the hunt gone wrong and the monster beyond the tree line. Those early narratives taught us what might keep us safe and what dangers lurked in the dark, mapping threats and possibilities into a shared mental world long before anyone drew a map on paper. Around campfires, hunter‑gatherer groups traded not just facts but imagined scenarios—exaggerated, half‑true, sometimes entirely invented—that helped bind strangers into a tribe and turn raw fear into a usable script for survival.​

Not every story our ancestors told was accurate reportage; many were myth, rumor, or morality tale. But even when they weren’t true, they were useful, encoding norms about loyalty, betrayal, courage, and cowardice in a form the human brain could remember: character, conflict, resolution.

We remain wired for this, which is why you can recall the plot of a childhood novel more easily than last week’s slide deck. Narrative still slips past our defenses in a way bullet points rarely can.

How We Use Stories With Children

We instinctively harness this wiring with children. Long before a child can parse a moral code or interpret a philosophy text, they can feel the sting of the boy who cried wolf and the shame of Goldilocks rifling through someone else’s belongings. Fairy tales and chapter books are the training wheels of moral imagination, giving children a safe laboratory where they can experiment with fear, fairness, courage, and consequence. Parents and teachers reach for stories because they know that a tale about a selfish prince or a kind sister lands where a lecture about “values” does not; children come to love or despise characters, and that emotional alignment becomes the hook on which behavior and virtue alike quietly hang.​

In those early years, fiction does double duty: it entertains restless bodies while tutoring their sense of right and wrong, offering vicarious practice in choices they have not yet had to make. A child who has walked with a character through loss, temptation, and repair has rehearsed, in miniature, the work of becoming a person who can apologize, forgive, or resist the easy wrong in favor of the costly right. Even school curricula reflect this intuition, using novels and stories to address fairness, bullying, and inclusion long before students sit in a civics class.

What Fiction Gives Adults

Somewhere along the way, adulthood convinces us that fiction is optional. Higher education, then later careers demand “practical” reading—email, reports, how‑to guides, continuing education—and leisure gets colonized by streaming and scrollable content. Yet the adult psyche is no less in need of stories than the child’s.

Experimental work has found that when adults are emotionally “transported” into a fictional narrative—drawn into the characters and plot—their measured empathy actually increases over the following days. Readers who frequently engage with stories, especially character‑driven fiction, tend to perform slightly better on tests of social cognition: the ability to read emotions, infer motives, and navigate complex interpersonal situations.

These are not massive, magical transformations; no novel is a vaccine against selfishness. But fiction appears to operate like a mental gym, offering repeated, low‑stakes workouts in perspective‑taking and emotional nuance. Stepping into the mind of a 19th‑century governess, a refugee crossing a border, or a father losing his grip on the life he built stretches the reader’s internal repertoire for what it feels like to be someone else. Over time, those imaginative repetitions can harden into habit—the quiet expectation that other people have inner worlds as dense, confusing, and contradictory as our own.

Fiction as Empathy Practice

Empathy is not only the warm rush of feeling with another person; psychologists distinguish between “empathic concern” (caring about others’ suffering) and “perspective taking” (mentally putting yourself in their shoes). Fiction happens to train both. When a story pulls you in, you are effectively rehearsing perspective taking: tracking the limits of what a character knows, seeing events through their eyes, and anticipating how they might react. At the same time, caring about whether those characters thrive or fall apart exercises empathic concern, even when you’re dealing with selves that never existed.

One influential line of research has shown that readers who are strongly transported into stories report measurable increases in empathy up to a week later, compared with people who read non‑narrative texts or who skim fiction without much emotional engagement. Brain imaging work adds another layer, finding that reading fiction with rich social content lights up regions associated with social cognition and emotional understanding, such as the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, more strongly in frequent fiction readers than in those who rarely pick up a novel. In other words, reading stories is not just a metaphorical rehearsal for human connection; your brain treats it as practice and responds accordingly.

If We Can’t Enter Fictional Minds

All of this makes a sobering thought hard to escape: if we are no longer able—or willing—to enter the mind of a fictional character on the page, what happens to our capacity to enter the mind of a difficult neighbor, a political opponent, a frustrating colleague, or a spouse in need of emotional connection? The low‑friction architecture of modern life rewards quick judgment and instant broadcasting rather than slow, imaginative listening. Algorithms are optimized for reaction, not reflection. If your nightly rhythm is a doom‑scroll of outrage headlines and performative clapbacks, your mental muscles for perspective‑taking are not being trained; they are being atrophied or, worse, trained in the opposite direction.

Fiction quietly resists this by forcing you to sit inside one consciousness at a time, without a comments section telling you what to think. A novel asks you to inhabit a person before you decide whether you approve of them, to live with their contradictions for a few hundred pages before your verdict. That slow habitation is the opposite of the hot‑take economy, and it is precisely the skill we need if we are going to live peaceably with people whose conclusions we detest but whose humanity we cannot erase. If we refuse that practice on the page, it becomes much harder to conjure it on demand in real life.

Empathy Is Culturally Declining

This is not just a hunch shared by weary adults who remember a pre‑internet childhood. A large meta‑analysis of data from almost 14,000 American college students between 1979 and 2009 found sharp drops in the two most distinctly empathic traits mentioned above: empathic concern and perspective taking. Compared to students from the late 1970s, those after 2000 scored about 40–50 percent lower on statements like “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me,” or “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective.”

The steepest declines appeared after the turn of the millennium, coinciding with the rise of social media, always‑on connectivity, and a culture increasingly organized around individual performance, self-help, and personal branding. Correlation is not causation, but the pattern fits an everyday intuition: in a society that rewards self‑presentation over shared presence, it becomes easier to treat other people as background characters in the movie of one’s own life. That is the very definition of shallow: a world where every interaction is an opportunity to perform rather than a chance to encounter a mind as deep and contingent as your own.

A Culture That Reads Less

Overlay that empathy slide with another trend: the slow, steady erosion of reading for pleasure. Analyses of time‑use data in the United States show that from 2003 to 2023, the share of Americans 15 and older who read more than 20 minutes a day dropped from about 22 percent to under 15 percent, even as time spent watching shows, gaming, or using computers for personal entertainment stayed close to 80 percent. Other reports from national surveys find that the proportion of Americans who read for fun on a given day fell by roughly 40 percent over the last two decades, with daily screen use filling much of the gap.

The pattern is especially stark among younger adults: in 2023, only about one in ten Americans under 55 qualified as “intensive” daily readers, compared to more than one in five older adults. At the same time, the minority who still read are, if anything, reading slightly longer when they do, suggesting a polarization between a shrinking group of deep readers and a growing group who rarely encounter longform text at all. It is not hard to see how a culture that increasingly outsources its imagination to curated feeds and video snippets, while letting narrative reading recede to the margins, might also be one in which empathy feels thinner and more brittle.

The Shallow World vs. Deep Stories

When empathy declines and reading recedes, you get a culture that can generate instantaneous outrage but struggles to sustain genuine concern. Public discourse flattens people into archetypes—the Karen, the incel, the boomer, the snowflake—because it is easier to mock a category than to imagine a person. Online, relationships become transactional and performative: you are interesting as long as you supply novelty or validation, disposable the moment you demand real effort. This is shallowness not only as moral failure but as a failure of imagination; it is the inability or refusal to grant others the narrative depth you automatically grant yourself.

Fiction pushes against that flattening. A well‑drawn character is, almost by definition, someone who refuses to stay in one box. They are generous in one chapter and petty in the next, principled in public and compromised in private; you watch them grow or regress, sometimes both at once. To read widely is to accumulate a private archive of such contradictions, which makes it harder to buy into the lie that real people are simple caricatures. The more time you spend with complex fictional humans, the more allergic you become to the thin satisfaction of dehumanizing real ones.

Reading Fiction as Adult Resistance

For an adult, then, picking up a novel is not escapism in the pejorative sense. It is resistance: a quiet refusal to let your attention, imagination, and empathic reflexes be entirely trained by platforms that profit from your outrage and encourage your distraction. It is a decision to keep practicing the work of entering another mind, staying there long enough to understand, and coming back changed for the better, even if only slightly. That practice matters whether you are confronting your own life challenges or disappointments, trying to stay committed to your goals or relationships in an age of easy exits, or simply attempting to remain human in a world that keeps nudging you toward being a brand instead.

If we lose the ability to inhabit fictional consciousness on the page, we will not magically recover it when our neighbor votes the “wrong” way, when our spouse does those little things that just grate on us, when our teenager confesses something that scares us. The skill we refuse to exercise for pleasure will not be available on demand for duty. Continuing to read fiction as an adult is one small, stubborn way of saying: I will not let my world shrink to the size of my own reflection.

Reflections on initial chapters of Hollis’s  The Middle Passage  and the crisis of the modern self.

We are living through one of the strangest paradoxes in human history: a time when the individual has never been more exalted… and never more lost. The modern world calls it “becoming yourself.” Scripture calls us to something else altogether: bearing the image of God.

The difference between these two visions—self-realization versus Christlikeness—is not a matter of nuance, but of nature. One begins with the self and spirals inward; the other begins with God and unfolds outward, toward His likeness, toward love. The first promises freedom but breeds narcissism; the second demands surrender and produces peace.

Midlife and the Myth of Self-Construction

The very notion of “midlife” is a modern invention. For most of human history, as Hobbes famously wrote, life was “nasty, brutish, and short.” Few lived long enough to experience what we now call a “midlife crisis.” The idea that a person lives long enough—and freely enough—to reimagine their entire existence is an extraordinary, and perhaps perilous, luxury of modernity.

We have come to believe that the purpose of life is to “become ourselves.” Yet this idea is quite new. In pre-modern times, one was formed by their community, kin, craft, and, most crucially, by their faith. The trajectory of life was not self-invention but faithful participation. Now, in an era where psychological authority has shifted from institutions to the individual, the soul has been left adrift. The collective myths that once tethered meaning have dissolved, leaving us to construct fragile little mythologies of our own.

The Dislocation of the Soul

Without the great unifying ideologies—tribe, tradition, or transcendent meaning—modern people often live in isolation, drawing their maps from the dim light of personal preference and self-expression. Where our ancestors had rites of passage, we have self-help books. Where they had sacred stories, we have identity branding. The tectonic pressure of this self-construction accumulates quietly over years, only to erupt when our early-life constructed selves begin to collide with later realities.

Psychologist James Hollis calls this eruption the “middle passage,” not a chronological event but a psychological reckoning. It asks, “Who am I apart from my history and the roles I’ve played?” This is the question buried under the rubble of career, marriage, achievement, and image. To reach it is not failure. It is grace.

The Narcissism of Childhood and Its Echo

The roots of our crisis lie deep in the psyche. The narcissism of childhood—the innocent belief that we are the center of the universe and immortal to boot—is tolerable, even sweet, in a child. But when adulthood continues to feed on this delusion under spiritual slogans like “authenticity” or “self-love,” it becomes grotesque.

In our culture, narcissism has been scrubbed and repackaged as wellness. We are told to “find ourselves,” to chase “our truth,” to worship at the altar of personal fulfillment. Yet, in spiritual terms, this pursuit inverts discipleship: it enthrones the self that was meant to be crucified.

Yet this narcissism is not merely individual; it has become institutionalized. Our entire culture now orbits around personal branding, self-display, and the continual broadcasting of one’s inner life. Social media has transformed confession into performance, turning what was once sacred introspection into public theatre. The sin of pride, once denounced as the chief vice of the heart, has been relabeled as self-assurance, ambition, and even self-care. But therein lies the tragedy: when the self becomes both idol and worshiper, every mirror becomes an altar, and every moment a liturgy of self-reference. The result is not wholeness, but fragmentation—a soul echoing endlessly within the walls of its own image.

The Many Deaths of the Self

If given the gift of a full lifespan, we will pass through many identities. The ego seeks to stabilize life as much as possible, but existence demands change every seven to ten years—physically, socially, spiritually. Every new stage brings a kind of death and rebirth, but without the mythic roadmap of faith, moderns resist these changes, clinging to the illusions of control and continuity.

Once, rites of passage guided this process—tribal ceremonies, stories of initiation, prayers that marked one’s entry into maturity. Today, those rites have vanished. Adolescents remain dependent, not only materially but emotionally and spiritually, far into their thirties. Why? Because no culture can lead its children to adulthood if it itself has lost mythic grounding. The twentieth century handed us materialism, hedonism, and a few computer skills—but none of these can transmit the sacred story of human purpose.

First Adulthood and the Mirage of Mastery

By forty, many reach what Hollis calls “first adulthood”: a phase where work, marriage, and family define one’s role. Yet much of it is performance, a projection—an external identity crafted to meet inherited expectations. Hardly anyone working two jobs and raising kids wants to be told that they are still, in some ways, children. But the truth is less patronizing than liberating: first adulthood is not the endpoint. It is the launching point for the soul’s reformation.

At this stage, the projections dissolve. The job or marriage that once seemed solid begins to tremble under accumulated meaninglessness. The promises that we would be exceptional, triumphant, or eternally young give way to the ache of reality. And reality—for all its pain—is far kinder than illusion.

The Middle Passage: Death and Rebirth

When all our projections, our substitute salvations, melt away, we enter the middle passage. We discover that we cannot outsource the search for meaning any longer. The old dependencies—on parents, on partners, on titles—are stripped bare. The psyche rebels, sometimes violently. Symptoms arise: anxiety, depression, malaise, neurosis. But these are not malfunctions. They are messages.

Hollis describes neurosis not as neurological defect but as “the protest of the psyche.” It is the soul’s complaint that something vital has been abandoned. In Christian terms, it is the heart’s yearning for reconciliation—to be made whole again in its Maker’s image. We may not recognize it as such. We may medicate it, rationalize it, or drown it in noise.

Yet beneath those symptoms lies a call: return to your true authority—not the one built on self-exaltation or external validation, but the one grounded in God’s image within.

Marriage and the Collapsing of Projections

Even our closest bonds often buckle under the weight of these projections. Traditional marriages, with fixed gender roles and rigid scripts, often reach a breaking point during the middle passage. Each partner, having exhausted a major identity, longs unconsciously for rebirth. Some trade one projection for another—a new career, a new partner, a new “purpose.” Yet without the spiritual courage to face our own deflated hopes, every swap is only a repetition.

Reject your partner’s change, and you will live with an angry stranger. Reject your own, and you will become that stranger yourself. But if both partners can endure the death of their projections, a new kind of union can emerge—not based on completing one another, but on accompanying one another as co-pilgrims toward God.

The Gift Hidden in the Collapse

There is good news: the collapse itself is the invitation. When illusions fall away, we are forced—not destroyed—to take responsibility for our souls. We are no longer children demanding that life redeem our childhood wish for immortality. Instead, we are adults learning to live with the mystery of death, trusting that the One whose image we bear has already conquered it.

For Christians, to become more Christlike is not to suppress individuality, but to transfigure it. Christ does not erase our uniqueness; He fulfills it by reorienting desire. The narcissistic self consumes everything in an attempt to confirm its worth; the Christlike self pours itself out in love, having already received its worth from God.

Yet even here, discernment matters. Not all suffering refines; some only corrodes. Scripture promises that endurance produces character, and character hope—but that sequence is not automatic. Suffering does not sanctify by its mere presence. If we use our pain to justify the very behaviors that separate us from God—self-inflation, condescension, resentment, vanity/pride, lust, deceit—then suffering becomes punishment, not purification. Many convince themselves that their hardship is drawing them nearer to God, when in truth they have refused His correction and remain steadfast in the sin that offends Him; this is what is causing their suffering. This is not spiritual growth but spiritual stagnation, a self-made wilderness where the soul mistakes disassociation for discipline.

True refinement begins when we allow suffering to expose, not excuse, our rebellion. To “find ourselves” in Him means precisely this: to face what must die within us so that Christ can live in us. Only when we stop treating our wounds as shields and lay them bare before God can healing begin. The middle passage, then, is not an invitation to greater self-expression but to greater surrender, to exchange the brittle fragments of self-definition for the wholeness found only in obedience. To suffer for God is to be drawn into His likeness; to suffer against Him is merely to be consumed by our refusals. One leads to resurrection. The other, to ruin.

Learning to Live Forward

To move from neurosis to new life is not an escape from suffering but an initiation into meaning. Suffering, in the Christian view, is not punishment but participation—our share in the redemptive work of the Cross. The middle passage strips away our deceptions so that our meaning can be retrieved from somewhere deeper than pleasure or performance.

In this light, every passage—childhood, first adulthood, the midlife undoing, and the final acceptance of death—is not random but rhythmic. Life’s changes are not interruptions of identity but opportunities to mirror the pattern of Christ: death, resurrection, renewal.

We may live in a time that worships the self, but our calling remains the same as it was in Eden: to bear God’s image, not our own reflection. This is not a rejection of the self but its true redemption. The modern world’s pursuit of “becoming who you are” finds its end not in self-expansion, but in surrender.

The cultural prophets of psychology and self-realization may diagnose the symptoms, but only faith provides the cure. For we were never meant to “find ourselves.” We were meant to find Him—and in finding Him, find ourselves restored.

Although the midlife period of awakening can be a beneficial journey—one that offers genuine opportunities for personal growth, self-actualization, and greater acceptance of self—it is far more often marked by maladaptive patterns that have become the subject of jokes and memes for an entire generation. The truth is that many only ever experience the unhealthy side: impulsive entitlement, self-destructive spending, reckless decisions, marital relationships ending in chaos, and family relationships irreparably broken by unforgiveable offenses. These manifestations should elicit horror, not laughter, once we see the deep wounds and disruptions they bring to families, careers, and an individual’s long-term life-satisfaction.

Psychologists describe the midlife crisis as far more than a bout of restlessness; it is a period of measurable cognitive and emotional constriction. This crisis period reshapes the inner landscape in ways that are predictable, but also profoundly dangerous: attention narrows, self-focus intensifies, empathy erodes, and depressive deepens beneath the surface theatrics. When those shifts collide with unresolved regrets and shaky relationships, the familiar clichés—affairs, sports cars, sudden exits—turn out to be the surface ripples of a much deeper psychological undertow.

This tunnel vision is why midlife demands and declarations often erupt with shocking intensity. A spouse may suddenly insist that they have been “unhappy for years,” issuing sweeping ultimatums and rewriting the history of the marriage, but this revelation comes without the slow, honest conversations that could have prepared the other person to understand or help. Your spouse cannot hear the words you never said, and they cannot reasonably be expected to respond wisely to a crisis you only reveal in the form of rage, threats, or a last-minute list of “needs” that must now reorder everyone else’s life.

Clinicians such as Mr. Max von Sabler have long noted that depression and anxiety in midlife are associated with a kind of “cognitive constriction” or tunnel vision, where a person’s mental field of view narrows around perceived failures and thwarted desires. Recent work on “tunnel vision depression” describes how individuals in a negative mood state show a reduced ability to scan their environment broadly, both visually and cognitively, becoming locked into repetitive, self-focused loops that make alternatives and nuance literally harder to see.

Lifespan researchers such as Laura Carstensen and colleagues, whose socioemotional selectivity theory has shaped much midlife research, argue that as people recognize time horizons shrinking, their goals naturally shift, prioritizing emotionally charged concerns and unfinished business over exploration. That shift can be healthy when it leads to deeper relationships and meaning, but when filtered through depression or unresolved regret, it increases the likelihood that midlife adults will zero in on what they lack or “never got to do,” fueling an urgency that masks as authenticity but functions as psychological tunnel vision.

This literal and metaphorical narrowing of the field of view, locks a person in to seeing only their own pain, failures, and unfulfilled desires, while losing sight of the broader context of their life. Instead of holding both the good and the hard in tension, the midlife mind can fixate on regrets, missed opportunities, and imagined alternative lives, ruminating to the point that the present feels intolerable and every existing commitment looks like an obstacle to escape.​

The intensification of self-focus in midlife crises is not only anecdotal; it fits within a broader body of research on adult egocentrism. Social neuroscientist Claus Lamm and colleagues have documented an “emotional egocentricity bias,” where people rely too heavily on their own emotional state when judging others, a bias that varies across the lifespan and can re-emerge when cognitive and emotional resources are strained. More recent work on older adults finds that “self-generated anchors,” or one’s own prior experiences and feelings, can disproportionately shape how they interpret others’ emotions, especially for negative states like anger and distress.

In the midlife crisis, that egocentric tilt plays out in recognizable ways. Years of unspoken discontent and fantasy are suddenly presented as self-evident truth: the person insists they have been “unhappy forever,” that their needs have “never been met,” and that everyone around them should have simply known. Psychotherapists who write about midlife in men note that this collision between an “authentic self” narrative and longstanding roles often produces an internal courtroom in which the crisis sufferer is both prosecutor and star witness, constantly rehearsing grievances while minimizing the unspoken nature of those needs.

Empathy, which developmental and social psychologists treat as a multi-component capacity to feel with, understand, and care about others, is particularly vulnerable under conditions of stress, depression, and the more narcissistic traits being brought out. Sara Konrath’s meta-analyses on empathy trends have highlighted a long-term decline in dispositional empathy and a rise in self-focused traits among younger cohorts, raising concerns about how adults handle relational strain later in life. Clinical research on narcissistic personality disorder further shows that stable patterns of entitlement, exploitation, and low empathic concern are strongly associated with chronic relationship conflict and diminished life satisfaction.

When midlife crisis emerges in someone already high in antagonistic or “rivalrous” narcissism—marked by competitiveness, hostility, and a tendency to view others as obstacles—empathy can plummet precisely when it is most needed. A recent review of narcissism across the lifespan, summarized by psychologist Ulrich Orth and colleagues, notes that antagonistic narcissism is particularly corrosive to relationships: as age and stress increase, these individuals often become more desperate, angry, and isolated, their capacity to charm diminishing while their willingness to demean or discard others remains intact. In pastoral counseling and psychotherapy literature, this pattern is frequently observed in midlife: the crisis becomes the justification for abandoning commitments in the name of “finally taking care of myself,” a rationale that cloaks relational harm in the language of self-care.

Behind the visible theatrics of midlife crisis, depression often functions as the dark engine. Epidemiological and clinical reviews on later-life depression emphasize that midlife is a pivotal period in which people confront “approaching endings, limited opportunities, and aging brains and minds,” and that failure to adapt emotional regulation strategies during this phase increases the risk of major depressive disorder later on. Mental health organizations and health systems describe common midlife crisis presentations—persistent sadness, anhedonia, irritability, loss of motivation, and changes in sleep or appetite—as classic depressive symptoms that can be masked by overwork, substance use, or compulsive novelty-seeking.

Qualitative “lived experience” studies of depression report recurring descriptions that echo midlife crisis narratives: feeling “like lead,” emotionally dead, unable to see a future, and unable to derive meaning from previously fulfilling roles. In that state, the depressed midlife adult may interpret their numbness as proof that their marriage, faith, or vocation is pointless, when in fact the blunting is a symptom of mood disorder rather than an accurate verdict on those commitments. The combination of tunnel vision and depressive cognition creates a perfect storm: the person sees only the pain, believes it has always been this way, and cannot imagine it ever changing.

Taken together, these psychological findings give teeth to the lived reality described. Lifespan and midlife researchers frame this life stage as a critical period in which physical changes, marital strain, children’s challenges, vocational ceilings, and accumulated success or failure converge to trigger a shuddering reassessment of life and the desire to be somewhere else. Counselors who specialize in midlife note that when years of unvoiced dissatisfaction meet this convergence, the result is often a sudden, dramatic surfacing of demands that feel new to everyone but the person who has been privately ruminating on them. Unspoken needs therefore erupt as demands.

Your spouse, however, cannot respond to words never spoken, nor can they be expected to cooperate with a process that is only revealed at the point of ultimatum. The empirical literature on egocentrism and depression makes clear that in the crisis mind, it genuinely feels as if the internal monologue has been public all along; in reality, the conversations have been almost entirely intrapsychic. That gap between inner rehearsal and outer communication is where marriages and families are blindsided, not because there were no problems, but because the midlife psychological squeeze turned those problems into private indictments rather than shared challenges.

When viewed through this empirical lens, the midlife crisis is exactly what we name it: a crisis in the strictest sense, not a meme, not a joke. The tunnel vision, self-focus, empathy collapse, and depressive fog that characterize it are well-documented phenomena in psychology and neuroscience, and they carry real-world consequences when left unexamined. The task of faith, therapy, and honest community in this season is to widen that constricted field—to pull the person back from the edge of their own perspective, reawaken empathy, treat the depression, and turn unspoken grievances into spoken, workable truths before the crisis writes a story no one intended to live. If the parties will permit it.

Note: this article is an excerpt from my upcoming book “Narcissism in the Midlife Crisis.”

I’m a little late to the Wicked: For Good debate, but realistically, between parenting and work and writing and farming, it’s amazing I get out for leisure time at all. Late into the holiday break, I finally made it to the theaters to see if the second half was truly as horrible as some Christian commentators have suggested.

First, I don’t love everything about the adaptation or the acting, but they really did well with the wardrobes, colors, and overall glamour. The fixed some of the race undertones from the first movie. A few songs were underwhelming (As Long as You’re Mine) and a few story elements overblown (Elphaba’s parentage). But for the most part, it captured the spirit from the original production.

A story more about friendship than romance, I’ll always remember fondly the first time I saw it live with my own childhood best friend. We had just graduated high school and our parents sent us to our own “Emerald City” tour in the magical world of New York City to explore and celebrate before we launched our own studies and career paths.

As for the aforementioned Christian commentators, their criticism seems ill-placed. Instead of taking offense at a fictional world where God has been replaced with “His Ozness” or overtly sexual elements, their biggest issue is that this story teaches kids that what is evil is in fact good. Nothing could be further from the actual plotline.

When Wicked originally premiered, it was the first majorly popular “villain backstory” tale, spurring many others in the wake of its success. We now have villain origin stories about Disney characters Cruella and Maleficent, as well as Joker and Minions: The Rise of Gru. These later stories absolutely focus on early trauma and abuse that build the narrative that you should empathize with the villain and realize that they were just “misunderstood” or justified in the path they chose.

Wicked tells a very different tale and I’m shocked at the misguided attacks, especially from those who seem “based” enough that they don’t fall for mass narratives. For all the trauma, abuse, insults, and the like that Elphaba experienced in her life, the entire point of the plot is that she still chose what was good, but that the media story was made up as a lie to label her as evil, wicked. Now where have we seen a media that distorts truth and slants stories to build a mass vendetta against specific parties? Literally every day for the past several decades! Let me explain how that has come about, and why it is seen most clearly in politics.

For decades, broadcasters in the U.S. operated under regulations that required them, as a condition of keeping their licenses, to cover issues of public importance and to present contrasting viewpoints on controversial topics. The Fairness Doctrine, which previously mandated that broadcasters cover news-worthy and facts-based issues and present the spectrum of contrasting viewpoints, was abolished by the FCC in 1987, effectively freeing broadcasters from any obligation to balance perspectives or prioritize what most serves the public interest. The Equal Time Rule still exists, but it only applies to political candidates, requiring broadcasters to provide equal opportunities to legally qualified candidates for a given office to use their broadcast stations. This practice has opened the door for outlets to pivot from shared public service to niche audience capture, yet also creates silos of conversation that reinforce only one side of an issue and perpetuate a cycle of bias. Unfortunately, for generations (especially older generations) that relied on the news for facts-based coverage, many aren’t aware of the changes to laws and decades-long slide towards an angled perspective, this isn’t readily apparent.

This shift has led to the emergence of many news sites creating “OpEd” content, or opinion editorial. In a way, this is similar to how an Advertorial presents as a news story, but is really a masked advertisement for a company, so long as they put the word “Advertisement” in small print at the top. An OpEd may have small words at the header that state it is an opinion piece, meaning not true research journalism, but that tends to get buried as the information is presented as fact, with an opinion or conclusion about what to do with this information tied to it. Remember, I work in marketing and in the media; where many of us, including me, still want to convey quality information, yet one can readily see how easily people can be misled in thinking they are getting news when they are truly being served opinions and self-serving promotions.

However, on a positive note this shift in FCC regulation has led to people having a plethora of options to find tailored content they are most interested in, even if that is a “slanted” or biased take. This is not just applicable to politics, but also in entertainment podcasting. Yet, it has led to cases where what is done for good is distorted and what is done for evil is championed. And both sides of the aisle think the problem lies with each other. Wicked makes this a focal point, and I, for one, think it is past time that this news trend reverse course.

From conservative Christians especially, because it is inherent in our faith, truth should be something we advocate for, and a story that reveals to the masses that (gasp) the media lies or collaborates on a narrative to suit questionable purposes is exactly the type of plot I think people most need to see. Because of changes to the way news platforms are governed, everything is slanted, and without discernment to ask more questions or dig deeper, we just buy into the narrative of our own biased selection. From Epstein files to Covid vaccine injuries to election integrity to the latest shootings or murders, it shouldn’t matter what side of the aisle you sit on–we should all be demanding that truth prevail. We have to stop silencing our opponents and reading only that which affirms our bias. We have to force the two viewpoints to bring their complete set of facts together and present married, unified, purely objective narratives again.

Psychologists have referred to a pattern called the “continued influence effect,” finding that repeated exposure to a false story builds such a strong mental model that later corrections and even the most verifiable facts can rarely unseat. Experimental work on belief perseverance shows that when people have heard a misleading narrative many times, they tend to keep relying on it in their judgments even when they understand and can recall the debunking, and in some cases a direct confrontation with the facts can make them double down on the original error. In other words, the longer and more often a lie has shaped how you see the world, the harder it is to let it go, even when the truth is laid out in front of you.

As the Wizard tells Elphaba, she’s facing a losing battle: “Take it from a wise old carny, once folks buy into your blarney, it becomes the thing they’ll most hold onto. Once they’ve swallowed sham and hokum, facts and logic won’t unchoke ’em. They’ll go on believing what they want to. Show them exactly what’s the score; they’ll just believe it even more.” Later in the song “Wonderful,” the wizard acknowledges, “Truth is not a thing of fact or reason; truth is just what everyone agrees on.” Watching this, the critically-commentating crowd saying that the narrative of this movie is to make Elphaba’s evil look like good are the “Sheeple” that are just as easily manipulated in their beliefs as the folks of Oz are.

One element of Christianity that does come through is that even when Elphaba tries to “do good” with her powers, things don’t always work out the way she hopes. She accomplishes her goal of saving certain characters’ lives, but at significant physical and functional detriment to them, and often misguided rage against her. This reminds us that even when we try to do what is good in our eyes, it still falls short of True Good. Romans 7:15-20 says, “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me,” highlighting that sin sabotages even good desires and actions. And in Psalm 14:3 we are told, “All have turned away, all have become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one.” Elphaba’s song “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished” tells this quite well: “Sure, I meant well, but look at what well-meant did…”

She then faces her worst temptation to never attempt to do good again (“I promise no good deed will I attempt to do again. Ever again.”), which I think if we’re being honest, is something we have all been tempted with at one point or another. If being good doesn’t pay off, what’s the point in even trying? That must be the subject of a much lengthier future article. But, being the good character she is, she can’t hold on to that sentiment for long. Quickly, her narrative shifts to “I have been changed for good.”

Elphaba has always been rejected for being different, yet blessed with gifts others only dream of having, so almost everyone in her life feels both envy and disdain for her at the same time. She gets momentary glimpses of what a healed life might look like, but at a cost to her morals, which she will not sacrifice just to fit in and be loved. She continues to wish that she could work with the Wizard and do good at a large scale, falling for his tricks many times, and each time truly approaching the possibilities of a bright path ahead, filled with sincerity and hope. She has so many dreams of how to do what is good, and every time sees those aspirations dashed in front of her eyes.

Elphaba’s external differences, coupled with her magical differences, leave those who don’t take time to know her terrified, but they are a façade; what upsets them most is her differences in ethical values and willingness to fight for what is right, even if she is alone in doing so. I am reminded of a point made in a wise teacher’s book “Disability and the Gospel” that one of the reasons those with visible disabilities make us so uncomfortable is that while their brokenness is readily recognized, it reminds us that we too have brokenness that we are so careful to mask. While their weakness is on physical display, ours is metaphysical, spiritual, which is, ultimately, much worse. “Glinda, the Good Witch” is even referred to as “the goodliest” for being the one who best wears the mask of blissful happiness and righteousness while broadcasting falsities to everyone she encounters.

Those who recognize their weaknesses, and are forced to publicly own their flaws, while nevertheless fighting for some sense of what is right and good, being willing to challenge distorted or dysfunctional narratives are often labeled the “Black Sheep.” Regularly noted in psychology discussions, the Black Sheep is often just the one who sees through narratives and manipulation, possibly the only one willing to confront this behavior, speak truth, and officially name reality. No matter what truth and wisdom they show, their boundaries will be crossed, they will be insulted and criticized, and they will face mounting obstacles and barricades, as those with less visible but more moral weaknesses band together to maintain their carefully constructed and often cruel world. The reality is this: Sheeple will always identify, call out, and blame the Black Sheep in order to deflect what is spiritually missing from their own character and behavior. And the Black Sheep will do what they do: disappear. They will be quite frank in their decision to excuse themselves from the narrative building to choose solitude over complicit participation.

As judge, jury, and executioner, the Sheeple of Oz take a mass vote and announce their assessment: “I hear her soul is so unclean, pure water can melt her.” Their judgment says that even this baptism of sorts with the “fatal” bucket of water is insufficient to cleanse her soul, at least by their eyes. How true is this of so many of us? We believe that our view of right and wrong, and possibility of salvation, somehow trumps God’s? Perhaps the acknowledged Black Sheep is the one who has walked through the fire and has seen the real light, but we’ll never admit it.

This tale forces us to face our own need for internal evaluation and for discernment of right and wrong. Who in our society is making good “evil” and evil “good”? Who in your immediate world is leading you astray, whispering in your ear as you judge others, while ignoring your own flaws? How willing are you to fight for what is right, even if you have to do so alone?

I’ll leave you with a quote from “Atlas Shrugged,” regarding that fictional world’s version of heaven: “No one gets in by denying reality in any way.”

There is so much more to being a good writer than understanding the rules of grammar and syntax. We can write and re-write, and no matter what, it never feels “finished.” There are always changes that can improve the way a point gets conveyed, new facts and figures you wish you’d had at your fingertips, or better analogies and anecdotes you think of that make a piece feel more relevant to the reader. And then, there is the question of authenticity to a piece.

In some of my training, there is one principle I go back to almost weekly: show, don’t tell. It is one of the hardest things to do and one of the last steps in editing a piece. After all the research and fact-checking and outlining of points, have I conveyed what I’ve written in a way that makes it easy for a reader to experience it, not just read it at arms-length? The importance of “show, don’t tell” in writing is to create an immersive, emotional, and memorable experience for the reader, allowing them to infer and feel events through sensory details, actions, and dialogue, rather than being simply informed of the same.

This is much more critical in fictional writing. A “tell” would be a sentence that reads, “She woke up angry.” A “show,” on the other hand, would sound more like, “She threw open the door without noticing whether it closed behind her and marched over to where he sat. Slamming her books down on the table so hard that his coffee sloshed into his lap…” It takes more words, but I don’t have to tell you that the woman is angry and assume that you’ll just trust me; you can see and feel her anger as if you’re at the next coffee table and considering whether to take cover. This also invites you, the reader, in to the story actively and makes you care more about what happens.

This same principle in our daily lives is revealed through the sentiment “actions speak louder than words.” We see it in relational mismatches of effort most regularly, but the issue is much broader than that. It’s the reason (well, one reason) car rant videos make us cringe. It’s divorced parents trying to one-up each other with social posts of pictures with their children, yet still can’t make the school play. Or at the holiday season they come out with gratitude posts about their blessings, statements about how their children are their world, yet the rest of their year is nothing but selfies and a whole lot of “show, not tells” that reveal it’s all just for show. It’s all about making a statement, but not making it real or carrying through.

On some level, this isn’t intentional. Some people truly don’t have the emotional depth to dig much deeper, so they simply can’t show you much deeper genuine sentiment. We should appreciate their effort, but recognize not to look for more. Some do, but their goal is to convince you that it is there through a social post as opposed to lived behavior.

I picture the scene from The Matrix when Neo tells Morpheus he knows kung fu. Morpheus responds, “Show me,” before loading a simulation program where Neo gets to demonstrate that he truly has the skill he’s just claimed.

Deeper for us to consider, this is also why social posts about “thoughts and prayers” after a tragedy fall flat. Yet Christians can’t understand why someone would take such little regard of their offered prayers when many of us consider taking our prayers to God one of the most meaningful ways we can battle the greatest evils of our time and face confusing situations that shake the world. Our thoughts and our prayers mean something to God.

The problem to the outside world is that we seem to be talking the talk without walking the walk. It looks like we’re spending a few seconds on a social post about the impacts to a community, without making a meaningful contribution through our efforts. We should be seen as lifting our fingers, and to do more than just type a Tweet.

Yet we want to chime in to the broader digital conversation about collective pain, and there may be meaningful work truly going on behind the scenes. So what to do?

Next time there is a tragedy, I challenge you, instead of typing the words “thoughts and prayers,” to actually type out the thought or the prayer. An amazing psychological thing happens when you read real words. They become part of the sentiment you speak within your mind. In a way, you will be inviting others to pray your same prayer alongside you as their eyes take in your words. No longer just an eye-roll sentiment because you’re telling me you had a thought and offered a prayer; I see your heart through that prayer and feel I have joined you in a moment of compassion and emotional care.

We live in a digital world and if connecting through the internet is the new “gathering place,” then let’s find a way to make it a meaningful environment! I’ll also point out, we are told in Matthew 18:20 that “where two or more are gathered in my name, there will I be.” This gathering place, while virtual, is a gathering place nonetheless, where God hears and answers prayer.

So rather than telling your audience how you feel, welcome them into the shared experience in a way that causes all parties to lean in. When offered with genuine intention, sincere compassion, and lived empathy, it will be tangible; it will make others more likely to act, share, and remember the thought and the prayer, instead of dismissing it as a stunt and meaningless claim.

Don’t tell us. Show us more of those thoughts and prayers.

The other night, I thought one of our chickens had been lost.

This is nothing new where I live. Danger prowls both night and day. Not only the usual hawk and racoon culprits, but coyotes, hogs, gators, bald eagles–we’ve even seen bobcats and panthers on the trail cams. Those chickens live in a perpetual state of risk, much like we do in this world. Every afternoon I free the birds for a couple hours before sundown, so they have some taste of freedom, but they don’t always all make it back safely.

As a quick note on chicken naming, these little fluff balls get named in batches of like-age birds according to a theme. Names are not indicative of gender (they’re often named before it’s obvious), but because of the weird chicken and egg crisis last year, I took whatever birds I could lay my hands on and wound up with more roosters than anything else, which will be dealt with quite imminently.  This round were all artists, authors, and characters of a certain age: Picasso, Melville, Hawthorne, Doyle, Sherlock, Oscar [Wilde].

Just before Thanksgiving, I went to lock up for the night and Picasso had been brutally attacked. This grey and white “painted” bantam (ones with poofy heads) was cut and bloodied across his entire face. I wasn’t even sure if his eyes were still intact under lids which were fused shut. My youngest, Quentin, is a great lover of animals and my happiest helper with them. We moved Picasso to a quarantine coop so the others wouldn’t pick at him and daily tended his wounds with neosporin until he was thriving again. For a little, I thought he might have to come on the Thanksgiving road trip with us to continue his care, but Picasso did fine as king of his own little coop castle.

The only problem was that the other roosters would not accept Picasso back into the flock. I couldn’t even free two coops at the same time (normally how they learn to acclimate with new birds) or I would spend the rest of the night splitting up a violent cock-fight. All the other roosters needed to go, or Picasso might need to find a new home. But he was so gentle that we hoped to keep him. One afternoon, I freed just him so he could strut around the outside of the other coop without the larger mean roosters going after him. But I forgot about the inherent safety in numbers.

I was outside doing yardwork when I heard the screams and by the time I ran over, it was too late. A hawk only half his size had still managed to spring an attack. The hawk lost his dinner, but we lost the little guy we had just spent weeks nursing back to life. When I told Quentin, his eyes were about the size of dinner plates. That’s just farm life, but no one fully warns you how much it hurts when you lose a little life you’ve tended so carefully. The girls in his grade even held a virtual funeral for the last little frizzle we lost.

But Picasso’s sister Oscar is the family favorite. Since Quentin is allergic to fur, this prevents many traditional pets, but the frizzle birds almost feel and act like furry little kittens. They even join laps for movies and purr. But it must be said, they’re sort of the special needs class of the chicken realm. We happen to find their antics endearing and quite comical. They tend to get picked on a bit and we love on them extra to make up for it.

After freeing everyone one afternoon, they made a move on Oscar, but that spunky girl puts up a heck of a fight. Those red roosters are pretty tough on the little hens, and I have acknowledged that their time has come. But that same night when I went to lock up in the dark, little Oscar was not in the coop where they all bed down. The memory of Quentin’s wide-eyed expression instantly swam before my eyes at the thought of having to tell him that she was now gone also and I panicked.

I grabbed a flashlight and started hunting through the surrounding meadow in the dark for any evidence of where she had been snatched as proof she was truly gone. I scoured each other shed or structure where she may have gone to hide, thinking a solitary life must be better than one with those roosters. I went back to the coop and counted obsessively. We farmers call this “chicken math.” I hunted through the dark like a mad woman until I finally found the little cubby she had tucked herself away in and I brought her back to the flock.

I felt like the woman in the Parable of the Lost Coin in Luke 15:8-10, wherein a woman loses one of her ten coins, then diligently searched her house, lighting lamps, sweeping, cleaning, until she finally finds this precious item, then calls her friends over to celebrate it, symbolizing God’s great joy in finding one wayward, repentant sinner. This follows the Parable of the Lost Sheep in Luke 15:3-7 where a shepherd leaves 99 of his flock to find the one lost and restore it, revealing a similar message.

In one, the search occurs outside the established safe zone of the flock, recognizing that evil and danger prowl to draw us away from the flock and the mercy God shows as He seeks to find us where we are and bring us back. But in the parable of the lost coin, the woman searches within her home, revealing that there are those that reside within the church and Christian community, yet are still lost and have not truly repented and given their lives to Him.

In both, God demonstrates that His search for us is individualized as we repent. As the Good Shepherd, He carries us on His shoulders as if we are the only one in need of mercy and care. Not many realize, a shepherd will often break the legs of a wayward sheep to keep it from wandering off again, which is why it needs to be carried. Even this difficult process is done in love, though when we’re the one whose legs have been broken, it may not feel like it at the time. God’s personal and persistent love for us shows us just how much He cares to keep us from grave errors, to protect and provide for us, and to shepherd each of us with love that is sometimes tender and sometimes tough, but always true.

My efforts to find little Oscar both inside and outside of the coop are nothing compared to how God seeks us. I didn’t even know where to search, and yet God knows whether we are simply a sheep that has gone astray in the world or a silver coin hiding in the midst of others. I do know the moment of rejoicing that I felt in finding my goofy, yet precious little bird. Not just a nameless member of the flock, this little life was unrelentingly and actively sought after. I also know the agony of failure with the very different result in saving Picasso; my efforts to protect and heal him were insufficient and ineffective. This lesson is twofold. First, not all are meant to be saved; sometimes we will not be successful. Second, it is not up to us to decide who is saved. All we can do is try to demonstrate the security and love found in God’s saving grace. Then you have the evil roosters, whose destruction is imminent, and the brutal truth is that God still uses those who will not be saved for the purposes of His glory.

As each lost soul is saved, we are told that all the saints rejoice. We are told that God knows precisely how many will be saved and we are patient as He builds His kingdom. Yet many of us know the agony of waiting for the finality of Christ’s return, crying out “How long, Oh Lord?” and I began to imagine the rejoicing throughout heaven as the very last soul to join the flock returns to the fold.

My pastor recently shared the allusion that repentance and faith are like two pedals of a bicycle, that we must intentionally work back and forth constantly to keep moving forward in our journey towards Christ. He also presented the challenge to consider whether there had been true repentance versus just continuing on in life, reminding me that repentance isn’t just turning away from sin, but turning toward God. Too often we treat repentance as a one time thing at the moment of conversion to faith, then tend to think that the work is complete and we simply now live “in Christ.”

That’s just not how it works. We all still stumble and fall and commit sins; what matters is what we do with that continued sin. Does it mean you aren’t a true follower of Christ if you still err? No, don’t let worldly thinking tell you that. Do you love your sin still, or champion sin in others, as we’re seeing with some celebrity personas right now? Well, that’s not the mark of a true believer, yet when it is pointed out to you, you again have a choice to commit your heart to the Lord. Our ears should all frequently hear the echo of Nathan to King David, “You are the man!” when Nathan challenged him for his sins, supposedly done in secret, yet with devastating public consequences, to which David appropriately broke down and cried out, “I have sinned against the Lord!”

Only one man has been above sin in this world. And more sin requires more repentance. While we live in this fallen world, we will be faced with this need over and over again. Finish your race well. Would that we all respond to our sins being revealed to us in the way King David did.

I have a few friends who swear they pray a prayer of repentance every morning, but their lives do not reflect any remorse for the things they have done. And some of these are practitioners of works-based justification! If this is pointed out to them, they become irate, claiming it is between them and God. I have even heard other believers avidly state, “I agree that what you are saying is the right thing to do, but I am not going to do it.” Don’t shirk true repentance when the need is revealed to you. It isn’t simply words you say only to God, then go about living your life the way you always have, since we will all face the judgment throne one day, and the thought of choosing to live in sin and knowing we will have to face Him should leave us terrified.

And yet we’ve been forgiven, if we have faith in the saving grace of Jesus. There is that comfort–that we are not our own, but belong body and soul, in life and in death, to our faithful Savior Jesus Christ.

So this begs a question: why do we repent to God? Why is it important to do, once we are saved, knowing that we are forgiven and Jesus has already paid the price for those sins? Is it just to check a box that we have “done the right thing” in actually saying it to God? That can’t be, because that’s just another way to make it about us fallen folks and our efforts which remain insufficient. I would say that by earnestly acknowledging to God that we are sinners puts us in right relationship to Him, recognizing that He is Lord of all, and just how much we need His grace and mercy daily. It is more than simply words, but should so rack our bodies with remorse that it causes us to cry out to God with humility and longing for Him to change our hearts to seek and be more like Him. To not have this response is to incur more guilt and judgment that we must later account to God for, and the thought of choosing to live in sin and knowing we will have to face Him should be more than we can bear. For we too, I too, have sinned against the Lord and it brings me to my knees.

So another question: why should we not treat other people in the same way when we have also sinned against them? If we also seek to be in right relationship with our friends, family, colleagues, others, do they not also deserve to know that we as Christians will hold ourselves accountable for our actions and seek to make up for what we have done?

When I was young, my dad once had me make a list of everyone who had been hurt by something I did. He helped fill in the list so I could see just how large of an impact a single choice could have, the ways sin ripples out and touches the lives of others you never even considered. If we take our time to truly consider the far-reaching impacts of our sin, the ways it has tainted our life and that of others we love and some we don’t even know, it should bring us to our knees. Then the ones we are able to reach deserve to hear that we recognize what we have done and would like to restore the relationship. Sorry shouldn’t just happen inside our head if we have the opportunity to speak it aloud.

There have been many opinions about the “What Would Jesus Do?” slogan popularized a few decades ago, but what I’ve always found to be a more fitting question is to instead ask “What would I do if this were Jesus I was doing it to?”. As Jesus said in Matthew 25, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.” This can apply to acts of kindness or ill treatment alike. That sin you’re refusing to change in your life, to apologize for, or attempt to make amends that you have done to someone in your life–it is as if you did it to Him. Would you still have done it if you had Him in mind? We all fail at this daily, this pausing to ask these two questions, but what we can do is repent and apologize after the fact, then earnestly seek the transformation of our hearts to move forward in a way that would be pleasing to God.

Sometimes we must ride our bicycles up a steep path, and those pedals–faith, repentance, faith, repentance, faith, repentance–get hard to push. And we can’t really ride a bicycle well if we only push one pedal and ignore the other. Sometimes the faith pedal is more challenging, and sometimes the repentance pedal hurts to lean into. If facing your sins and pushing the repentance pedal seems difficult to bear, I pray that the good news of the faith pedal refreshes your spirit. Keep pedaling forward; finish the race well.

Back in mid-November, my next fellow co-authors and I joined our publisher for a group call. We had all signed up to author a chapter in A New Vision for DEI and were meeting each other for the first time.

Diversity has been important to me for a long time. Part of the vision for this book came about as I was speaking to my Greener Data publisher about concepts for a book we were ideating that would allow me to re-release my Summer 20XX thoughts in a new way, and maybe still bring about the lessons learned as I’ve been able to move away from the pain of loss suffered shortly after its first publishing. As we talked about our goals and vision, it became clear that another work was so timely that we had to join forces again to share different thoughts on diversity.

So she set about arranging another multi-author publication that would capture these new collective thoughts. Our first call helped to guide us all together to be part of this conversation as a way to speak our vision into existence. We all shared how we needed to be “in the room” in order to do this.

Because the subject is DEI, I love that this is a multi-author work, because none of us can do this alone–we weren’t meant to.

We were each asked to answer a few questions and, to lay the groundwork for my portion, I excitedly wanted to share my answers with you today.

Why did you say yes to writing a chapter in this book?

I have faced my own share of discrimination. The sad thing is that we all have. Either age, gender, background, or some other perceived difference have caused others to form negative opinions about us without ever giving us a chance. I wanted to leave a legacy of bringing these conversations to the top with new perspective to help shape a better path for others in the future.

In the past, I have run ERGs, spoken on panels about DEI, and because of my visible role writing and marketing, was asked to champion diversity as a female millennial and a public face at a former company. The tech space I work in is a huge adopter and supporter of diverse efforts. This led to my personal career mission to strive for a world that is connected, sustainable, and equal. With this background, I’m doing more writing, more public speaking, and even some consulting for organizations that are just starting to build their employee groups.

What does the word diversity mean to you?

I believe it is not only possible, but necessary for us to embrace people from all walks of life, both physical/tangible attributes such as race, gender, age; as well as intangible such as personality, function, belief systems, backgrounds. Diversity is our recognition of humanity in others and respecting them regardless of differences.

What have you noticed is missing from the DEI conversation today?

Some of our means of driving DEI practices just aren’t working or aren’t well received. As society, we need to discuss things we can do that won’t anger or incite. We need to understand the different challenges to the various forms of equality, what we can do differently, and how to reach an agreeable path to a better world.

What is one leadership book you love?

This was such a challenge to answer! In books, I am influenced by both nonfiction and even fictional works that elevate strong characters. But nothing is more impactful to how we lead than what we have experienced ourselves, both the positive and the negative. We’ve all encountered a manager who was a terrible leader that we hope to never be like. We all also have hopefully benefitted from an excellent leader or two that helped shape us for the best.

In closing, it is time for us all to work to shape a different world, and the aspirations for this book are so pure as we strive to do that. I can’t wait for the next call this week where we all share updates on what we’ve been working on this past month. The final book is slated for mid-April with a lot of great work and updates to come.

In Biblical times, Pharisees were leaders in synagogues, noted for strict observance of the minutia of rites and ceremonies and for insistence on the validity of traditions concerning written law. They strove to present an outward appearance of being perfect, but inwardly were just as sinful as everyone else.

Jesus portrays the Pharisees as impatient with outward, ritual observance of minutiae which made them look acceptable and virtuous outwardly but left the inner person unreformed. He preached against those who followed the letter of the law, but not the spirit of the law, meaning those who followed literal meanings, but not the intent behind them. This “holier than thou” approach and rejection of all things deemed in any way bad is an arrogance and hypocrisy He could not tolerate.

Jesus’ approach is full of both truth and grace, not one without the other. Yes, there are rules, but God is a relational being that sees the sinner and still loves him. The pharisaical approach that focuses only on rules and ritual is one which puts truth over grace and law over love. It is the approach that says, “I love others only if they do what is perfect and right,” instead of, “I’ll love others in spite of their mistakes.” I’ve personally seen it come out from people who say that they are “above such worldly things as logic and reason,” with their nose in the air. Yes, really.

God’s way: Love God. Love your neighbor. The rest falls in there somewhere.

Don’t get me wrong, rules exist for a reason. Some are even for good reason. Hear this though: Jesus never preached law over love. It was a balance. Truth filled with grace.
The Pharisees couldn’t handle that; they thought they were better than Him because of their strict adherence to law. Sadly, not much has changed with how people treat others, and to make matters worse, people are still using religion to back their animosity and coldheartedness – using Jesus, yet leaving Him mostly out of it.

Likely you’ve encountered someone like this in your life. Maybe you are someone like this to others and need a little truth and grace yourself.

Are you an over disciplinarian as a parent or teacher, unable to see the beauty and joy in childhood antics? Are you unyielding and unforgiving toward your family members? Are you a business leader who can only see policy, and never people? Someone with their nose so deep in the Bible or a rulebook that you’ve forgotten to look up and show love to anyone around you? You are who Jesus was preaching against: you are the new Pharisees.

Remember, Pharisees planned to destroy Jesus for showing love, for being love. And unfortunately, they’re still here today. Jesus taught us that the only law was love; it’s time we stopped crucifying people for it.