🌱 Formed: Showing Up or Shutting Down?

Fight, flight, freeze—and living from love in these fractured times.

How do we show up for ourselves and each other in a way that aligns with who we are in light of God's love, when the weight of family needs, work demands, and world injustices sits heavily on our hearts?

Where do we turn? What do we say? How do we respond?

Fight. Flight. Freeze.

When the ache is too much, we cope, sometimes in ways we don’t even notice. We get stuck in patterns that distract us, harden us, or just keep us treading water.

Flight: Some of us veer toward active avoidance. We scroll. We ignore. We push down anything that feels hard. We stay busy. We stay distracted. We don't want to feel what we think, so we don’t. Numbing becomes a way of life.

Fight: Some of us put up our proverbial fists and fight. We say, “Life is tough, but I’m tougher”—but not in an empowering way. In a clenched-jaw, shame-fueled way. We lash out at ourselves: You are a failure. You missed that deadline because you’re a failure. And at others: If they really cared, they’d do more. They’re heartless. We weaponize our wounds. We fight like our belovedness is on the line.

Freeze: We just keep moving, but without intention. We go through the motions. We’re not numbing on purpose. We’re not running. We’re not yelling. We’re just…stuck. Still breathing, but not fully living. This might be the sneakiest and most dangerous of all.

Raising compassionate, thoughtful kids in 2025 is hard. Trying to stay emotionally present and spiritually grounded is hard. Trying to be rooted in relationship with God when you’re stretched thin and more tired than you can put words to is hard.

Friends, how can we maintain a healthy inner life (connection with God) and an outer life (connection with others)? How can we establish healthy rhythms that care for our souls, our immediate lives (family, work), and our larger community role (what’s happening in the world)?

Contemplation and Action

How can we remain tethered to the presence of God and connected to the people around us? We’re called to both. Not either-or.

We do the inner work so we can show up to our lives in a way that reflects the kingdom of God. We nurture our souls so that we nourish the people and places in our lives. The work we do, the way we raise our families, the way we show up in the world? All of it reflects our relationship with God.

I read the news and I’m convinced that there’s a lack of soul connection with the Holy Spirit in the loudest and most-platformed corners of Christian culture. Too many are speaking about God but not living in step with God. There’s too much performance and reactivity and not enough presence or compassion.

This week, theologian and prolific author Walter Brueggemann died. We need more people like him—and fewer who perform cultural Christianity without ever being formed by Christ. Brueggemann once wrote: “YHWH’s promises characteristically do not concern escape from the world but transformation within it.” (Reverberations of Faith)

This is truly the most soul-shaping and deeply challenging space to dwell in.

Following Jesus (and no, I don’t mean just showing up at church every Sunday, but following Jesus in the corners of your life, being transformed from the inside out) means you embark on a path that isn’t well-trodden and often misunderstood.

Depending on what dysregulation cycle someone else is stuck in, you might be judged for giving too much grace ("How are you not enraged? Aren’t you paying attention?!") or not enough ("Oh, I just avoid the news. Calm down!")

But this is the way.

One of the reasons I wrote Every Season Sacred, and one of the reasons I’m training to become a spiritual director, is that I believe transformation starts within us.

When we make space for God’s great compassion to form us, everything changes—our families, our churches, our communities, and our systems.

What’s Forming You?

Contemplative rhythms help me remember that I’m not the center of the story.

Christ is.

I think about a critique I read of white Christians saying, “I can’t believe it’s gotten this bad in America,” and Black and brown Christians replying, “Here’s some history. Have some perspective.”

Perspective in the larger story matters.

A faith rooted in Christ doesn’t mean you triumphantly have all the answers or never hold any doubt. A faith rooted in Christ reflects the ways of Jesus: ways of peace, ways of humility, ways of steadfast hope, ways of solidarity, ways of rootedness in the redemptive way of sacrifice and mercy, ways of strength that come from what others might call weakness.

We don’t need any more Instagram carousels with cute fonts and shallow theology.

We don’t need another feel-good worship song that sounds nice on Sunday but doesn’t change how we live on Monday.

As Lisa Sharon Harper writes: “Thin faith creates its own collection of Instagram memes that serve as life principles.” (The Very Good Gospel)

We need a faith that can hold the weight of this world—and still show up in love. We need to reorient our hearts, minds, bodies, and souls to the One who gives each breath. We need transformative life change that comes living in step with the Spirit.

That’s great, you might be saying, but how?

I think it starts with listening for God in all things, not just in the giggle of a baby or the song of a sparrow, but in the whole of life together. In the annoying political commentator we can’t stand. In the family member or coworker who is getting on your last nerve.

As Bonhoeffer put it: “We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God.” (Life Together)

More often, prayer isn’t talking at God but a listening to. Turning down the mental chatter and the media consumption we have at our fingertips 24/7.

Sometimes prayer is just…presence. Listening. Paying attention. Being.

As I wrote in Every Season Sacred, we are constantly being formed. Every day. Every moment.

What are you formed by? Are you formed by keeping up with the Joneses? Your job? Your need to be liked? Your TikTok algorithm? The pressure to be everything to everyone? The belief that you’re only as good as what you produce?

Ruth Haley Barton writes: “If we are not careful, technology has a way of compromising our ability to be present to ourselves, to God and to each other.”

We are being shaped by something. Every minute. Every scroll. Every thought.

Henri Nouwen asks: “Do these highly sophisticated forms of communication and this increasing amount of information lead to a deeper solidarity and a greater compassion? It is very doubtful.”

Everything is spiritual. How we spend our time. Our money. Our attention. How we speak to our kids. How we speak to ourselves. What we say online. What we do when no one’s watching.

So what are we giving up when we let culture disciple us more than Christ?

Photo by Sandie Clarke on Unsplash

Inside Out

We’re existing in a time that has never been.

AI is developing at lightning speed and changing what we consume AND what we create. Our kids have access to psychological algorithms that no other child in the history of time has been exposed to. We are experiencing a government and political system here in the US that is acting in ways we have never seen before. We are fed wedge issue after wedge issue, and now we’re like fattened calves ready for the slaughter.

We must ask ourselves what we are sacrificing when we live into the liturgy of our culture rather than into the cosmic reordering of who Christ is and who we are in light of it.

I don’t know what to say except that things are really hard.

We’re talking to ourselves and to others and about others with hate-soaked speech instead of love-drenched lives. We’re quick to draw lines, to declare who’s in and who’s out. Borders and boundaries feel easier than hospitality and healing. Despair and cynicism often seem like the safer choices because hope, in many ways, can be dangerous.

We don’t have to have all the answers to forge a way forward.

Living into rhythms that heal instead of harm looks like turning, again and again, to the One who breathes love into dust.

When we turn toward God, we can also turn toward one another. We begin to live out rhythms of redemption. We stop pretending. We start listening. We repair. We apologize. We forgive. We create beauty. We hold up each other's arms and whisper the song when one of us forgets the melody.

No one is perfect, and we won’t always get it right. But in Christ, perfection isn’t the point and never has been.

Madeleine L’Engle wrote: “I wouldn’t mind if to be a Christian were accepted as being the dangerous thing which it is… I do mind, desperately, that the word ‘Christian’ means for so many people smugness, and piosity, and holier-than-thou-ness. Who, today, can recognize a Christian because of ‘how those Christians love one another’?” (A Circle of Quiet)

I’m not here to hash out partisan talking points, though I do believe our faith and how we view God, ourselves, and others shape the choices we make, not limited to, but certainly including, our political alignment.

Whoever we are or what our backgrounds are or perspectives are, we are united in something bigger than ourselves—something eternal, something that sweeps across the galaxies and into our very souls—the Spirit of God. (See John 14:26.)

Everything is spiritual, including how we spend our time, money, and resources, how we speak to people. How we speak to ourselves.

Feeling confusion, cynicism, or despair is not wrong; it’s human.

But the way we move forward is by constantly turning toward the One who transcends space and time. With dependence on the One who is bigger than ourselves, bigger than our small ways of thinking and being. Because when we do this, we can then turn toward each other, cultivating rhythms on earth as it is in heaven.

We can’t create a utopia on this side of heaven, but we can repair and redeem, reconcile and restore where we’ve hurt and harmed, where we’ve been hurt and harmed.

In Christ, we don’t have to be constrained by the confines of our culture. We can be renewed and enter into renewal. This is our ongoing work. We’ll do it imperfectly, sure. But the veil of perfection has already been torn by the One who came toward and still moves toward us today.

We can write new stories.

You can write a new story. Right now, in this moment, minute by minute, hour by hour. You do not have to take the world on alone, but you can turn to the One who crafted the world and called it good.

What messages have you internalized about yourself? Who or what is forming you, and what would it look like to invite God into those spaces of your soul?

Prayer for Father’s Day

Lord, bless the fathers in their many forms,

Who love with open arms,

Who walk in patience and peace,

And who bring passion and playfulness

To their families, young and old.

May they feel the fullness of Your great love,

Today and in all days to come.

We thank You, Lord, for fathers.

Excerpt from To Light Their Way: A Collection of Prayers and Liturgies for Parents. (Read the full prayer in the book!)

Year of Breath

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Weekly Breath Prayers

Monday
INHALE: Form me, O God,