Last year, we came up with a new way to capture the work I’m trying to do. We used the words “Reimagining the Good Life.” We renamed this newsletter, and my podcast, and I began speaking about the idea of reimagining the good life, reimagining family life, and reimagining disability.

There’s so much in our world that is disillusioning right now, so much that suggests the work of reimagining will be an exercise in futility. And it’s exactly in that context that we need the work of reimagining.

Reimagining is an act of hope. It is the work of believing that we can envision a good future for ourselves, for our loved ones, for our communities, for our world. It is the work of stepping towards that future.

Hiroshi Yoshida | Memories of Japan | Detroit Institute of Arts

Last week, I had the chance to speak in a few different places about reimagining. First, I visited Elim Christian Services and Trinity Christian College, outside Chicago. I then flew back to New York and spoke at the Women’s Conference at Christ Church in Greenwich, Connecticut. The audiences ran the gamut—from a group of paraprofessionals who work one-on-one with kids with disabilities to a group of college students to a chapel full of moms and grandmothers. All of them were ready to consider a new way of being in this world.

Photo courtesy of Joanne Bouknight

I spoke for over four hours when you add it all up, so it’s hard to summarize, but I thought you might appreciate some thoughts on how we reimagine the good life, with the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-10) as our guide.

It’s one thing to point out the ways the American idea of the good life isn’t working. It’s another to practice a different way.

I offered the women at Christ Church six ways to reimagine the good life. I’m going to share three of them with you here:

3 Ways to Reimagine the Good Life

1. Receive belovedness.
   Our culture tells us we are worthy of the good life if we look good, work hard, and achieve a lot. One way we can reimagine the good life—one way we can live differently—is to know that we are beloved before we’ve done anything right and after we’ve done all sorts of things wrong. (If you’ve been around here for a while, you’ll recognize this refrain as a cornerstone for me, and you can access this PDF guide if you want more thoughts on how to receive belovedness.)

2. Lament.
   The American Good Life tells us to keep the images of beauty, ease, and success front and center. A reimagined good life includes the hard realities of being human, with suffering and hardship and confusion. The practice of lament is the practice of crying out honestly to God when we experience hurt, anger, sorrow, and when nothing makes any sense. It is telling God that this is not okay, while holding on to the slightest glimmer of hope that somehow it might be someday.

3. Use Your Spiritual Imagination.
   If we don’t resist it, the influencers and celebrities and people in powerful positions get to tell us what a good life looks like—whether that’s the good life of materialism with fancy houses and cars and clothes or the good life of moralism with religious piety or keto-diets or kids who get into the best colleges. Our imaginations are shaped and formed by these ideals. But when we instead turn to the good life articulated and embodied by Jesus, we receive a different imagination. We can cultivate that renewed imagination by meditating on passages from the gospel where Jesus shows us what his version of the good life looks like. (For example, in the session I taught recently, we considered Matthew 5:3-10 and Luke 14:1-24. I asked the women to consider who they might invite over for dinner with Jesus’ reimagined way of hospitality.)

Q&A

I loved being able to share my thoughts with all these people, but I also loved the thoughts and questions they shared with me. Here were a few of my favorites.

Let’s stay in touch. Subscribe to my newsletter to receive weekly reflections that challenge assumptions about the good life, proclaim the inherent belovedness of every human being, and envision a world of belonging where everyone matters. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube and subscribe to my Reimagining the Good Life podcast for conversations with guests centered around disability, faith, and culture.