I read a lot of books, and most I never end up mentioning. But when I was reading Tish Harrison Warren’s book, I stopped mid-sentence, put it down, and picked up my phone to text friends. “You need to pre-order this book,” I said.
I have friends like me who are in the long middle of our stories, and some of us are weary and disoriented. We’ve done many of the “right” things, but still find ourselves wondering if anything is actually happening in us. So I was grateful to talk with Tish and for the wisdom she shared:
1. Spiritual practices aren’t a formula for an easy life.
Prayer, Sabbath, and other practices are not “silver bullets” that guarantee peace, growth, or happiness. Tish points out how we can do all the things and still feel exhausted or bewildered. “Maybe where you are is the place to be. Maybe God is right in the midst of not knowing if anything’s happening. Maybe this is where you burrow down and go deep into the things of God.”
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2. Fortitude is learning how to keep going in the long middle.
“We need the practice of stability. We need fortitude. We need to learn how endurance or perseverance is different than a John-Wayne kind of stoicism: ‘Just do it, just get through life.’”
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3. The desert exposes our transactional view of God.
“In the desert, God just stopped performing for me.” Tish explains that seasons of spiritual aridity revealed how much she wanted to control God through inputs and outputs—doing spiritual practices in exchange for closeness, progress, or certainty. But real communion with God is less predictable and less controllable than we tend to expect.
What grows in weary lands? Tish writes, “God gets us going with fireworks, but we grow deep when the craft of faith becomes dull or difficult. The cacophony within us settles and we slowly, painfully release the imagined good life that we once demanded and learn to cling to God himself.”
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Tish Harrison Warren on 🎙️Reimagining the Good Life: The Spirituality of Weariness: https://amyjuliabecker.com/tish-harrison-warren-spiritual-weariness-stability-faith-doubt/
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Amy Julia Becker desires to challenge assumptions about the good life, proclaim the inherent belovedness of every human being, and help us envision and build a world of belonging where everyone matters. Amy Julia invites people to reimagine the good life through her writing and speaking on disability, faith, and culture. She is the author of To Be Made Well, White Picket Fences, Small Talk, and A Good and Perfect Gift. She is a guest opinion writer for national publications and hosts two podcasts: Take the Next Step and Reimagining the Good Life. Becker is a graduate of Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary (MDiv). She is a member of the Disability Ministry Network and the Alliance for Disability Justice and Ethics in Reproductive Genetics. She lives with her husband and their three children in western Connecticut.
