• Subscribe to Amy Julia’s Substack newsletter: amyjuliabecker.com/subscribe/
• Books: You Were Never Meant to Do It All, You’re Only Human, and Embodied Hope by Kelly Kapic
• Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
• When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert 
• Becoming Whole by by Brian Fikkert and Kelly Kapic
• World Happiness Report
• I Corinthians 13

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WATCH this conversation on YouTube: Amy Julia Becker on YouTube

SUBSCRIBE to Amy Julia’s Substack: amyjuliabecker.substack.com

JOIN the conversation on Instagram: @amyjuliabecker

LISTEN to more episodes: amyjuliabecker.com/shows/

Note: This transcript is autogenerated and does contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

Amy Julia (00:05)
I’m Amy Julia Becker, this is Reimagining the Good Life, a podcast about challenging the assumptions about what makes life good, proclaiming the inherent belovedness of every human being, and envisioning a world of belonging where everyone matters. Today we are asking some good questions about the good life, including the very basic, what is the good life? But also, is the good life marked by money and success and achievement, or is a good life marked by love?

and what might that look like? Dr. Kelly Kapick is here today with me to talk about these topics. One thing I loved about this conversation was Dr. Kapick’s honesty about how easy it is to try to pretend that we are not creatures designed for lives of love and how beautiful it is to imagine admitting our limits and depending on God and one another more fully.

Kelly Kapek is professor of theological studies at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, where he’s taught since 2001. He is a popular speaker and the award-winning author or editor of more than 15 books, including most recently, the devotional, You Were Never Meant to Do It All. He’s also the author of Christianity Today Book Award winners, Your Only Human and Embodied Hope. You can find out more about all of these things and what he’s doing at kellykapek.com.

and there’ll be a link to that in the show notes. So here’s my conversation and thanks for being here. I am here today with Kelly Kapek and I am so delighted. Thank you so much for joining us.

Kelly (01:41)
I’m really happy to be with you, AJ.

Amy Julia (01:44)
Well, you wrote a book a couple of years ago called Your Only Human, How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That Is Good News. And I remember reading that title and reading that book. And it must have been in between podcast seasons or something that your book came out, because I did not have a conversation with you three years ago when it came out. And so was really excited because recently you released a new book. And that book is called You Were Never Meant to Do It All, a 40-day devotional on the goodness of being human, which is kind of like a

similar but slimmed down version of Your Only Human, which gave me an opportunity to reach out and have this conversation. So I’m thrilled and the titles alone, I think, are intriguing and perhaps invitational to people who are listening to this podcast. But I still thought we might start there and just ask you to give listeners a sense of the ideas that have animated both of these books and what’s at the center. What are some of the themes that you’re writing about and why?

Kelly (02:40)
Yeah. Great questions and thanks. Yeah. I’m glad. I’m glad we had a reason to chat. My, ⁓ in some ways what, what’s driving the whole thing is, you know, we often write through our own biography and struggles. At least I do. think that’s, you know, I’m, I, as I wrestle through things, if it’s helpful to me, maybe it can be helpful to others. And you know, to make a long story short, like the idea of you’re only human, you know, that could, that could sound negative. Like, Hey, you’re only human.

Or it can also be like, hey, you’re only human, right? And I think there’s probably appropriate sides to both of those things, right? There is that sometimes it’s a rebuke and sometimes it’s a liberation. But as a theologian who happened to come from the reform tradition, one of the things, and I grew up Roman Catholic and did a PhD in the Puritan. So I kind of swim in guilt and shame. know how to do that. And one of the things that I started to realize after a couple of decades is

I really think we’ve often confused what I would call finitude, and I can explain that, what that means with sin. So we feel guilty all the time for simply being human. Finitude’s a fancy word for limits. That’s why we use that language. Limited in space, time, knowledge, and power. Like you can only be one place at a time, know one thing at a time, or only know so much. But I found myself in my own way just feeling bad for not being able to do everything, keep up.

keep up in my field, keep up with all the literature, et cetera. And at some point you realize, wait, does God want me perpetually feeling guilty? Or maybe we’ve misunderstood limits. So that’s part of it. Maybe that’s at least a way in to start talking about it.

Amy Julia (04:25)
One of the things, so as I think you know, we have a daughter with Down syndrome and I was in seminary when she was born, which is now almost 20 years ago. And I remember really struggling actually with the idea of kind of the fallenness of creation. So not only the fact that we are sinful humans, but actually the idea that all of creation is broken in some way because of that sin. And a friend of mine, ⁓

said to me, my friend Patricia, it was like this huge aha moment. She said, you know, limitations and brokenness are not the same thing. And that was this revelatory moment for me because I had really always seen them as the same thing. Yeah. And I realized that if I were to try to live, I was trying to live a life without the creaturely limits that had been given to me. And that is what I was seeing as problematic about our daughter’s life was the limits.

Not the brokenness. She was healthy. She was at home. We were delighted in her. And yet I was seeing her limits as brokenness and kind of the limits that would come in the future. So that for me was kind of that turning point. wasn’t so much about guilt as it was about that concept of brokenness, which I think is similar. So I’m just curious to hear ⁓ whether you think, yeah, what do we gain when we distinguish these things, whether it’s distinguishing sin from finitude or brokenness from limits like ⁓

Yeah, what do we gain and how do discern between those?

Kelly (05:52)
Yeah, it’s very meaningful. Thanks for sharing more of your story and I’m sure your listeners know more about it. But you may not know, but my journey is similar in a different kind of way. I’ll give you a very, very short version. my wife and I got married in 1993. We were married almost nine years before we had children and then we had kids and in 2008 she had breast cancer, a form of cancer that normally

much older people like women of 70s and 80s get. Long story short, year later she’s declared cancer free. We thank God it was traumatic, but we’re through it. And then in 2010, summer of 2010, she developed a form of chronic pain. was two different things, a thing called man on fire disease and another thing. And basically since that summer to this day, there’s never been a day that she hasn’t dealt with pretty serious pain and fatigue.

through her encouragement and an unexpected grant through the Templeton Foundation and stuff, I ended up doing research on suffering and wrote a book called Embodied Hope on the kind of a theological meditation on pain and suffering. And it was through wrestling through those things and lament and like you said, the brokenness of the world. And really being honest about things and not cheesy like, hey, everything’s good.

that I finally felt after writing that and working through that, I could finally write about the goodness of being human. But it was like I had to think through the pain and get really honest about it. But then it liberated me to say, yeah, we do confuse these things all the time. And so limits aren’t a problem. There are problems and they are worth lamenting, but being a creature is not one of them. And so it did.

It sounds like same with you where it was like we had to untangle those things. It’s kind of like dyslexia and dysgraphia runs in my family. Well, I don’t know, that could just be a different way God made us. There’s not any moral weight to that. It’s just we happen to live in a culture that really values reading and writing. But we kind of get sloppy on some of those things and it’s worth thinking.

Amy Julia (08:06)
Thank you for that and thank you for sharing from your own journey because I do think when there is like a, there’s a depth to how we understand our humanity when we’re able to both rejoice and celebrate in our creatureliness and also to lament the aspects of who we are and who our loved ones are that are painful and enduring. think that.

the chronic pain ⁓ that so many people endure is ⁓ really worthy of lament because it’s just so hard ⁓ for such a long time. ⁓ I’m also struck that although you and I can both come at this with these very personal stories, you also would not have been asked to write a follow-up devotional book if there weren’t a wide recognition that there was an audience for it, right? Like that people are actually needing

this conversation. And I think I look on my bookshelf, I think about like the some of the books I’ve read in recent years by is it Oliver Berkman? Is that his name?

Yeah, exactly. So again, like really meditating on our mortality, on our humanity, on what it means to be creatures living in time, although I don’t know that he would call us creatures ⁓ in the sense of I don’t know how much he thinks about a creator. Regardless, I’m curious ⁓ if you’ve thought about why readers are really resonating with these themes and why we need these books right now. Like, what is it about our cultural moment that is actually crying out for these conversations? Yeah.

Kelly (09:35)
No, that’s a great question. mean, and as you know, and you were kind of pointing out, Oliver Berkman’s fascinating as an example. He’s not a person of faith, but he’s very thoughtful. He’s read like Augustine and he’s read these folks, even though he’s not a person of faith. And his big aha moment kind of researching 4,000 weeks, which is the average lifespan of someone in the Western world was those of us in time management industry are trying to convince people they’re not mortal, right? And so you have lots of non-Christians where

we can just feel it in our bodies that things are wrong. So you have this growth of kind of mindfulness practices and other things and breathing techniques. And I’m not against many of those things. think for me, like breathing techniques can be very helpful, but it occurs to me that theologians have something to contribute here. Christianity does have a particular perspective. And with this ever increasing demand for more, right? We live,

in the Western world with this primacy of efficiency and productivity. I think it’s really affecting us. And so for me, people kind of can hear, yeah, you should slow down. We kind of say that, but the interesting thing is, but why? And from the theological perspective, we can have a healthy way of saying, it doesn’t have to be lazy, right? Laziness can be a problem, but this idea that you should be able to endlessly run is also a problem.

And so I do think we can just feel it literally in our bodies and we need help.

Amy Julia (11:08)
Yeah, I think about, again, back to those early days of thinking about Penny’s diagnosis and recognizing that my ⁓ vision of an ideal human, if I really kind of teased it out in my mind, was an isolated individual who could do all things for herself. And I compared that to my understanding of a biblical human, whether that’s Adam and Eve in the garden before the fall or Jesus in his humanity. And it was like,

Okay, dependent upon others. Get relationships of love, needy, vulnerable. Like so antithetical to the vision I had portrayed for myself without knowing it actually, because I’d just kind of ⁓ taken that in. And I do wonder how much, yes, getting the freedom actually that comes, your idea, like that comment you made about you’re only human. Like that actually should be a freeing ⁓ invitation.

to live out our humanity rather than this kind of depressing, can’t do it all because to the name of your other book, you were never meant to do it all. So I thought maybe we could talk a little bit about the various ways we’ve distorted our understanding of what it means to be human and how that plays itself out. And then I guess on the flip side of that, what a fuller or more human way to understand ourselves is. I’ll read one quotation, which again resonated with me because of your my ⁓

experience with ⁓ intellectual disability. Actually, this is two different quotations. So one early on in the book, maybe we’ve inappropriately valued our brains in a way that distorts our view of being human. That’s one thing you write. And then later on you write, ⁓ if rationality is the measure of our humanity, the higher your IQ, the more human you would be. However, if we treat the faculties not in terms of measurements that can be ranked, but in terms of love and communion, then the criteria are all changed.

What makes us human is our distinctive ability to love and commune with God, other humans, and the earth. So I wanted to just tease that out a little bit. So again, kind of what are the distortions we have in our humanity, but also what’s the fullness? What are we living for?

Kelly (13:18)
Yeah, that’s so good. And it makes perfect sense to me that that stood out to you. ⁓ Because again, you and I wrestling through some of the similar things, which is what took me there. So a very brief version of kind of the history of theology on this, the debate of what does it mean to be human? And there were different times where the idea was, you know, if you want to know what it means to be human, compare humans to animals.

try and figure out what the difference is and that must be what it means to be in the image of God, right? And so sometimes you really have this elevation of reason or rationality. It’s reason that made us most like God. And that’s where you kind of get, it kind of lingers with us where it’s like, even though no one ever puts it this way, that contributes to this idea. Yeah, the higher IQ you have, the more human you are. Something crazy like that. ⁓

And so at different times there’ve been different what you would call human faculties that are exalted. Maybe it’s the will, maybe it’s the mind or reason, that kind of thing. So you had that. You have others who have said, no, no, no, it’s not a human faculty of mind, will, affections. Instead it’s humans functioning in a certain way. And that’s what makes them like God.

And then another would say, no, it’s really the idea, it’s kind of based on a Trinitarian idea, what makes us human is that we are relational creatures. Without fully unpacking all of that, I think there’s some truth in all of those, but part of what happens is what’s really there. And so the shortest version I would say is, resting through for a long time, think love is key, right? So the key is…

First of all, Jesus, we’re made in God’s image. Jesus actually is the image of God. And it’s not about your IQ level, but it is about, there is something about love. And you’ve experienced this where it’s like, sometimes you wanna know what it means to be human. Go hang out with someone like, who’s dealing with these things. And I tell one of these stories, Charles Colson’s grandson was like this. And all of sudden by going slow,

and being with his grandson who had done it, all of a sudden he sees things he’d never see and starts to experience life differently. And all of sudden using love as a criteria, I think can change things. I found that very helpful actually.

Amy Julia (15:33)
Yeah, that has been transformative for me, for sure. And again, what makes us human is our distinctive ability to love and commune with God, other humans on the earth. And I do think that can really reshape our understanding of our humanity, as well as to really honor the humanity of a really diverse range of humans and to actually see the ⁓ incredible idea of the image of God being reflected and refracted in all of us.

Kelly (16:01)
And the way that love might look like, you know, in our, you know, atypical experiences, right, or whatever, personalities, we actually have to start slowing down and seeing, that is interesting. That is an aspect of love or an expression of it that I’m not as used to, but maybe it can change me as well.

Amy Julia (16:24)
Totally, and in fact, for those of us who do use intelligence that gets really accolade, accoladed, affirmed through our culture. And I think you and I find ourselves in that place. There’s, think ⁓ that is where my humanity gets distorted. And I again, realized this when Penny was first born that I really did have a hierarchy of humans and she was not at the top of the heap. ⁓ I knew that that was not,

true, that’s good, but I had to confront it. And I had to really be like, as much as now I don’t think that way, that’s how I’ve lived, is as if there are certain people with more value than others. And in fact, what I need is people who don’t have the same gifts and abilities that I do in order to understand who God is more, in order to understand what it means to love. There’s so much that comes from that. And I think that goes a little bit to this idea of dependency. ⁓ You also write that-

Kelly (17:23)
Before you go on, because I love what you’re saying. And my guess is you totally agree with this. Part of it is it’s been interesting, know, because you said like who’s the audience and like we’re all feeling this, we’re all feeling overwhelmed and everything. I’ve started to say, you know, sometimes if this is a huge struggle for you, like it is most of us, go spend some time with people ⁓ who move at a different pace. Yeah. And it will…

forced you to reimagine life. And in many ways, I guess what I’m saying is, I’ve learned by pointing people to those relationships, it actually can help them reconnect with their actual humanity. Which is counterintuitive and shows that we tend to treat folks as non truly and fully human. And in practice, they are often the way to help us reengage our humanity.

Amy Julia (18:17)
I do think that sense of, I remember being asked once and I was speaking at a seminary and again, even though these were Christians who were kind of earnestly wanting to do and what we’re talking about here, they also were like, I’m still on an achievement treadmill where I’m trying to like beat out the other kid in my class. They were asking like, how do we do this? And I said,

one thing was I go inside as far as just like having a contemplative practice of receiving your own belovedness that is independent of the achievements, but also, yeah, spend time with people who are not on the achievement treadmill. And that might mean very young people, like babies. It might mean very old people who…

are in nursing homes or just not able to move quickly anymore. But it also often involves whether intellectual or physical disability because of people who’ve learned, yeah, I am equally human and I move more slowly through this world and there’s a real gift to be had in those encounters.

Kelly (19:17)
That’s brilliant. Yeah.

You do find, and I like the examples you use, mean, you do find couples who have a newborn, it rocks their world, especially in this achievement culture. And there’s something so beautiful about it because it’s so inefficient, right? There’s nothing more inefficient than love. But there’s something powerful that can reorient. Anyways, I love what you said, that’s great.

Amy Julia (19:45)
Thank you. Okay, I’m gonna I’m gonna pull myself back from what I was about to say because I do want to ask about dependence. ⁓ right. Another quotation. You write we must rediscover that being dependent creatures is a constructive gift, not a deficiency. So I’d love to ask you just to speak about why dependence is a gift and also how we rediscover that about ourselves.

Kelly (20:07)
Yeah,

yeah, it is interesting. You kind of hinted at this earlier. I do think for me, was studying humility that helped me understand this when I started to think, you know, should we be humble? And in Christian circles, we often assume our gut responses, we should be humble because we’re sinners. And I’m not denying that we’re sinners, but when you build the foundation of humility, or when you build humility on the foundation of sin, it actually distorts everything.

And as you hinted at, actually, the question is before Adam and Eve sinned, should they have been humble? And the answer is yes. So that means you wanna build the idea of being humble on the goodness of creation. And that then takes you to the idea that we, before there’s any sin or brokenness in the world, we were made in goodness to be dependent on God, dependent on neighbor, and dependent on the rest of creation.

And in our culture, the word dependence is like if I was like, you know, someone said, hey, you were talking to, you know, Amy Julia recently, how was that? And I’m like, she’s great, but she seems really dependent on a lot of people. It’s never a compliment in our culture. But biblically, that’s essential. So as someone who I make my living working as a college professor, right? And there are some truth to this where we want students to become independent, but there’s also some really destructive sides to that. And so,

how do you cultivate healthy dependence which is central to Christian discipleship? And not just this mythical dependence on God. One of the ways we grow dependent on God is by depending on other people. think, and depending on, you know, when we’re at the grocery store, that is dependence on all kinds of people we don’t even see doing the work and fostering that sense of gratitude to God and for those people that we don’t even see. That really changes us.

Amy Julia (21:59)
Yeah, so it sounds like some of that is literally just acknowledging the dependence that is just woven into especially actually modern life. I ironically, we think of ourselves as more independent when in fact, I mean, there’s like nothing in this room that I have created, you know, it’s like all been.

Kelly (22:18)
It

always makes me laugh. like, I’m a self-made man. I’m like, no, you’ve got a belly button, baby. It didn’t happen. You did not make yourself.

Amy Julia (22:26)
my gosh, it’s so true. ⁓ And I also I also want to hone in for a minute. I want to get back to humility. But one of the things that also really ⁓ I appreciated about your book was the reorientation instead of kind of starting with sin, starting with love. So not dismissing or diminishing the reality of sin in in our humanity. ⁓ And yet also you have a line where you just write about how ⁓ God is not ⁓

unable to be in the presence of sin, sin doesn’t want to be in the presence of God. So it’s like sin that is taking us away from God, not the other way around. Well, I guess it is the other way around in that God is taking us away from sin, but not scared to be there. In fact, what does Jesus do? But come into sinful humanity, literally, and say, here I am among you. And I just think that is something for all of us ⁓ that can prompt both that sense of like,

it’s okay to be dependent and it’s necessary to be grateful and humble as you said too. And I loved what you wrote about humility. ⁓ And you also write about kind of two different sides of humility, both what we think of as humility in terms of ⁓ kind of understanding that I am not the be all and end all of the world. But you also write about, ⁓

Pusillanimity, am I pronouncing it correctly? It’s like a new vocab word that I love. So will you speak to that a little bit, like the other side of humility that’s equally problematic?

Kelly (23:55)
Yeah, there’s, it is interesting. love that you brought that up. It is interesting that there are two sides, right? Um, there is the side of humility where you, you think you’re too grand and they are undermining your humility. Basically it’s, you start to think that you have powers that you don’t and that, that undermines humility is a problem. But like in the medieval period, Thomas Aquinas, a great theologian talked about, don’t miss the other side. The other side is God has actually given you gifts.

And when you have gifts and you don’t cultivate and use those gifts, that is anti-humility, right? Because it is saying you have gifts and you’re not believing or trusting God with those gifts and you’re hiding them, right? And it’s still, it’s kind of like, and we train people this way. I remember years ago, I had one of my colleagues, there was a performance, it was like this dance performance and the students did it and afterwards,

⁓ One of the faculty was talking to one of students and said, that was amazing what you did. And she responded exactly how everyone has trained her to respond. She’s like, wasn’t that good? And I always think about that as like, no, no, no. If I ask, do you think your gifts are a gift from God? We all say yes. But then when we start to respond, ⁓ it wasn’t good or ⁓ wasn’t, it actually betrays. We don’t think they’re gifts from God. They’re us. And so we need to downplay them.

So whether or not, I’m not saying you always, because sometimes it would be weird and inappropriate to say thank God or it’s God, but I think in our hearts, we wanna say, that is a gift from God. And I am called to cultivate and delight in that gift that God has given. And if I’m embarrassed to use those gifts, it actually, that’s selfishness. The gift was not for you, it’s for the common good. It’s for the community. So we are impoverished when we don’t.

allow people to use their gifts or we don’t use them ourselves, which is very different than often how we think of humility as like beat up yourself, think lowly of yourself. There’s a different side to it.

Amy Julia (26:01)
Well, and I also wonder about that attitude towards others. Again, I think ⁓ we live in a culture that values some gifts and not others, but to have the assumption that every human I encounter has gifts to offer, even if they are the gift of slowing down, right? The gift of ⁓ being present.

⁓ the gift of being unproductive, ⁓ which honestly is a gift, but not one that we tend to ⁓ actually value. And I think having that kind of proper humility will free us up to actually see that in each other ⁓ rather than, and to look for it, look for the ways that we need that from each other too.

Kelly (26:43)
Yeah, and I really like how you’re saying that. And part of what’s difficult, so nowadays I think we’ve thankfully finally gotten to the point where we’re like, we need people who are different than us to help us see our blind spots, right? That kind of thing in our biases and prejudices. That’s all true 100%. But it’s the same principle that not only do we need people to help us see our blind spots, we need people to help us see our strengths. Because our strengths often, it’s not that we don’t have to work at them.

but they come more naturally. Like if you work really well with children, you will assume everybody does, right? If you are ⁓ more quick to give words of encouragement or whatever, we tend to default and say, I assume everyone is like that. And they’re actually not. You have the gift of encouragement. And so sometimes it takes someone else around you to thank you or to draw attention to it. You go, like I didn’t know that.

So part of what I would encourage people, listeners to do is not just kind of do self-examination, because we’re only so good at that. Sometimes we’re not very good, but start to cultivate looking for gifts you see in other people and actually speak into them. And then they’ll do it for you. And it’s really, really helpful. And I think that looks and sounds like the kingdom of God to me.

Amy Julia (28:02)
I love that. And it goes back to your insistence, which I agree with, on love as foundational to the universe, the character of God, but also to, therefore, the character of ⁓ our full humanity. one place you write love not escaping or overcoming one’s creaturely limits.

is the goal of life. And I wanted to kind of focus in there as I think about the idea of the good life, which we try to examine and sometimes confront here on this podcast, because I’m wondering about the ways in which overcoming or attempting to escape or overcome creaturely limits actually undermines our pursuit of a good life or the actual goal of life. But just would love to hear what you had to say about that.

Kelly (28:50)
That’s such a good question. Some years ago, I don’t know, eight years ago, something like that, there’s an economist, many of your listeners probably know him, Brian Ficker, who wrote When Helping Hurts. And we wrote a book called Becoming Whole, but the subtitle, which given the political environment didn’t do us any favors, but the subtitle which relates to your question was, Why the Opposite of Poverty Isn’t the American Dream?

And what basically the idea was, even though it’s not popular, is the church often without even realizing it, would try and help people like in other parts of the world or even in poverty situations in America. And what became the goal without even realizing it was, we’re trying to move you from this situation of homelessness to this vision of the American dream. And strangely you can move from one kind of poverty to a different kind of poverty.

Right? And so you have people with, with means and, I’m not belittling, I’m not trying to in any way downplay the seriousness of poverty ⁓ issues, but you have to realize what is the goal? What is the common, what is the good life that we’re aiming for? Cause otherwise you move them from one problematic life to another problematic life. And so I do think it’s very interesting to slow down, have conversations with your kids. Like what, what is the good life?

I found myself, I was surprised when my kids first started going to college. I teach at a liberal arts college, Christian college. I value all the right things. And then all of a when it’s my own kids, all of sudden I thought, wow, there’s stuff in me that I can’t believe how much I really want them to make money in ways that were very uncomfortable. And I had to work through. I’m not against people making money. That’s not the point. But all of the sudden,

I was exposed, my heart exposed me to, despite what I think is the good life and what I was really thinking was this money thing. And so to re-imagine like, and you see this happen all the time where as parents were like, no, we really want our kids to love God and we want them to serve their community and stuff. But actually all the choices we’re making very often show that’s not the good life what we think. It is about financial.

success, is about this kind of thing. And often the practices we’re doing and the values we have are undermining what as Christians we think the good life is.

Amy Julia (31:26)
I remember when there was a happiness report, like a global happiness report that came out a couple months ago. And I remember looking at it and seeing that Americans make on average so much more money than anyone else, any other country. mean, it’s like tens of thousands of dollars on average than any other, developed, less developed, whatever. And we are smack in the middle of happiness. It’s not like we’re terribly unhappy, but we are by no means off the charts happy.

I kind of was struck by two things there. One was that sense that we know, you know, that happiness and money are not the same thing. But it also made me wonder whether Americans actually want money more than they want happiness. Like that actually is how we’ve structured a lot of our relationships, a lot of our time, a lot of our days is in the pursuit of whatever we think comes with money, whether that is like the, you know, fun, fancy

thing or if it’s just the sense of security and stability or prestige, I don’t know. ⁓ But at the same time, these nations that really prioritize relationships and do not make as much money by far, ⁓ mean, truly are happier. And I think that many of us as Americans, and again, even within the church, ⁓ still are dismissive of that rather than like wholeheartedly pursuing it and saying like,

No, really, these relationships matter more than being able to upgrade my, you know, the size of my house or my car or whatever, whatever it happens to be.

Kelly (33:01)
And we never put it that way, or at least most of time, because once you say it that way, you’re like, my gosh, that’s terrible. But it’s the decisions we’re making, the way we’re organizing. And even it gets back to some of the things you were talking about earlier. It’s actually, we value people like, how much money do you make? What’s your position? And that is how we treat people. And when we lived in Britain, there was this great expression, a way of talking about friends. And someone would say, if they liked you, they would say, I have time for that person.

It’s very interesting, the way you describe friendship is actually you have time. That’s how I say I have time for that person. But what’s telling is, in our culture often, the people we have time for are the people who have means and we somehow think in one way or another subconsciously that they’re gonna help us, that they’re more significant. And we know it just undermines us. mean, the loneliness, the UK now,

In England, is literally in the government, they hired a loneliness czar. And it was actually job is, it’s such an epidemic. So absolutely, I do think it’s worth us, whether we’re single or married or have kids, have this conversation with one another. Just be really honest, like, hey, what is the good life? And get out a piece of paper and start just mapping it out, drawing, letting yourself imagine, laugh about it. And then just go, wait, is that actually how I’m structuring my life?

And what might that call me to do different?

Amy Julia (34:30)
I’ve ⁓ run a workshop a couple of times in some churches called Reimagining the Good Life. And what we’ve done is kind of collectively just given the American version of the good life. And that is so interesting because it includes like people will say country club memberships and they’ll also say philanthropic endeavors, but it is kind of this ⁓ performative good life.

And then we read the Beatitudes and contrast what Jesus says the good life is and talk about that because I’m like, yeah, I mean, I am right here in middle of trying to figure this out. ⁓ And I, you know, like a nice dinner as much as the next person. And yet I also have, I think by the gift of having our daughter and other experiences ⁓ in my life have encountered.

a different good life, right? That I do think is what Jesus wants for us, like that encounter with a spiritual reality, with a reality of God as love and us as creatures who get to participate in love here on this earth. ⁓ And then that as a real gift that’s very, different than what our culture ⁓ tells us to strive for.

Kelly (35:39)
Yeah, and it even does, it even, it’s interesting, you when you start talking this way, people are like, are you guys advocating for sloth or something, or are you, do you just think we don’t have to work? No, actually, Christian vision is human work really matters to God and to us. It’s really good. And, ⁓ you know, six days where we work and one day we rest, right? But what we have to do is think what does that actually mean?

And one of the things that’s happened to us is now quote unquote work is equated. We can’t even help it. When we hear the word work, we think paid employment. So, you know, when you’re spending time with your daughter, well, if you ain’t getting paid, it’s not work. And then we try and say, well, you’re, you know, stay home parents. That’s really valuable. But you can just feel like, no, you guys don’t actually think that. And it is, it’s because we don’t even understand work.

It’s not that we don’t understand just leisure or rest. We don’t understand work, which then destroys the whole kind of thing, right? So until we can stop thinking about good work as merely equated with income, that also screws us up. So in order to get to rest, we also must think about work.

Amy Julia (36:56)
Yeah, and I think all of that under some of these headings of creatureliness, limitations and love, you know, mean, different different ways. I would love to kind of end actually with thinking a little bit about limits and love. ⁓ I’ve kind of two more questions for you on this. The first is just in what ways when we begin to accept our limits, how do you see that as being related to

living lives of love.

Kelly (37:28)
I just, it’s, you know, we hinted at some of this earlier, but I just find efficiency and productivity, not a hundred percent of the time, but so often undermine love. And to really love something or someone, like the most inefficient thing you can do is love, right? Have a baby. And your life is, or get a puppy, right? All of these things are very inefficient. And until we start to say,

These things that make demands on us and slow us down or require, they often don’t even necessarily slow us down. mean, I don’t always know that parents feel like they’re going slow, but they reorient us and change what it means to be attentive, ⁓ to look at a face, to stare at Like parents can’t, of a newborn can’t help but just spend time looking at the face of their infant.

And we know now in human development how meaningful it is for a child to look at the face or to feel the touch of parents. And you can’t rush that. And I just think there’s something very beautiful in the way God made us and trying to learn to embrace that.

Amy Julia (38:43)
I almost said this earlier and I’ve probably said it here before, but I returned so frequently in my mind to 1 Corinthians 13 where Paul says, first thing, love is patient. And I think that really underscores what you were just saying that there’s no rushing it and there’s no, ⁓ yeah, there’s no way to do it efficiently, but there’s also just this truth to patient love that actually is very, very enduring.

I’d love to just end with thinking about any practices that might help us in this, help us both in the accepting limitations and living in love. I think we’ve named a few as far as kind of acknowledging the practices of gratitude and acknowledging those who have, that we’re dependent upon that we don’t even see. But I’m curious if there are other practices that you have or that you’ve seen other people employ that help us accept limits.

Kelly (39:36)
and

let in. Yeah, I mean, you just mentioned one, but I’d like to make sure, you know, really, for me, the practice of gratitude and lament are two sides of the same coin. And it’s a little counterintuitive, but the idea of lament, which often sounds very unspiritual, like where were you God? Why you’re, actually all of those questions, and as you know, like 35 % of the Psalms are lament, right?

So the practice of lament, even though it sounds like you’re not trusting God, the reason why you’re lamenting is you know you can’t control it, and you’re going to the one who is the sovereign king who’s supposed to be loving, and by your complaints, not about him, but to him, even if they’re about him, but it’s very different if you’re talking to him about it, rather than about him to other people. So when you lament to him, it allows you

to get more in touch, it reaffirms your weaknesses, your humanity, and that’s okay. And it takes you to the God who is God, and it can absorb that. And that’s very powerful. And the flip side of that is gratitude. Gratitude is recognizing all good and perfect gifts come from above. It’s fascinating that now there’s all this research on gratitude studies that you keep a gratitude journal for a month, every day five things you write down that you’re grateful for. It can actually change your

body physically, it’s just fascinating stuff. So those are big. And then the other, this very practical, for me, it was really interesting to get into this research where I started to think of sleep as a spiritual discipline and the theology of sleep. I’m sure many of your listeners like me, it’s gotten better, but there was a long, long time where every morning or every middle of the night, I’d wake up at three in the morning, two in morning.

and my mind is just filled with all the anxieties and all of that kind of thing. And just, you know, so thinking through what that looks like, and there’s more in the book on that, but what I would say is it’s fascinating to go, no, sleep is a spiritual discipline. The idea is we can sleep because God never does. And so if you’re on this front lines of a military, like you can’t sleep unless you have someone watching your back. And Christians every night say, God, this is, I’ve done what I can do. You know, I entrust you.

And to see that as an act of faith, and then I do think once a week, when we gather for worship, a day of rest is radical, not in any legalistic way, but a beautiful way that God can really ⁓ minister to us in body and soul.

Amy Julia (42:16)
Thank you so much for that. And as you kind of hinted at the end of Your Only Human does have some real practical practices that we can employ. And in all of it, I do think the this kind of shorthand of accepting limits and living in love is really animating for me in terms of, yeah, that’s what I want my life to be and how wonderful that living in love actually.

does not involve striving to overcome my limits, but actually allowing me to ⁓ believe that I am not God, but God has given me my life as a way to participate in the goodness of all this creation.

Kelly (42:57)
Amen. And it’s interesting that, you know, there’s the pop psychology that says, be kind to yourself, which can be problematic, but there’s, this is the theological justification for it. We can be kind to ourselves because God is kind to us. And God never expected you and I to do it all. So we’ve got to start being kind to ourselves and stop beating ourselves up when we think we’re supposed to. He’s like, no. So it’s not just pop psychology. There’s a theology here. God is compassionate. He’s singing his benediction over us.

And as we lean into that, do think we can be kind to ourselves as well.

Amy Julia (43:31)
We’re going to say amen to that and thank you so much for being here today.

Kelly (43:35)
You got it. Thanks for having me.

Amy Julia (43:41)
Thanks as always for listening to this episode of Reimagining the Good Life. If you’re interested in the topics that Kelly and I talked about today, I do want to invite you to subscribe to my sub stack newsletter. Each week I explore what a good life really looks like for individuals, families, and society. And I do that through the lens of disability, faith, and culture. I also share books, podcasts, movies, and more that I’m loving.

And it’s just a wonderful way to hear from you and stay in touch. The link to subscribing for free is in the show notes. We’ve got some great conversations up ahead. I’m going to talk to Sharon Hattie Miller on the idea of self-forgetfulness and Leah Labresco Sargent on the dignity of dependence. I’m really excited for these conversations and I hope you will stick around and join me for those.

To that point, I would love for you to let other people know about this podcast. The ways you can do that are by following the show, so you receive it every time we drop a new episode, by rating the show and reviewing it. I know that takes more effort than most of us who are podcast listeners want to actually take, but if you are a podcast listener who wants other people to know that this conversation exists, you can rate or review the show and that would be a huge help.

And you also can just share it with other people with like a very simple click of the share button. ⁓ You also can let me know your questions or suggestions. There’s a link at the end of the show notes that says send us a text. You also can always email me at Amy Julia Becker writer at Gmail dot com. I want to thank Jake Hansen for editing this podcast. Thank Amber Beery, my assistant, for doing everything else to make sure it happens. And thank you for being here. I hope this conversation helps you.

to challenge assumptions, proclaim belovedness, and envision a world of belonging where everyone matters. Let’s reimagine the good life together.