In the world of Fantastic Beasts, there is a creature called an Obscurus. It forms inside a child who has been forced, again and again, to suppress something that is actually a gift, something that was never meant to be hidden. The child learns, the only way a child can learn something this large, that the safest thing to do is to push it down, hide it, deny it exists at all. And the Obscurus is what that hiding becomes when it has nowhere left to go. Not the gift itself. The shape that survival takes when a child has to bury something true about who they are in order to stay safe.

The image is fictional. What it is describing is not.

THE HIDING THAT DOESN'T DISAPPEAR

When a child has to hide the way she was made, that hiding does not disappear just because she grows up. It turns. It becomes something else, something that looks, on the surface, like a personality trait, or a coping mechanism, or just the way a person is. But underneath it, if you trace it back far enough, ...

The Formation You Didn't Sign Up For

In Hinds' Feet on High Places, a shepherdess named Much-Afraid sets out on a journey toward the High Places, led by the Shepherd she loves. She expects the journey to be hard. What she does not expect, what nearly undoes her before she has gone any real distance at all, is who she is given to walk with.

Two companions are assigned to her for the climb. Their names are Sorrow and Suffering.

She did not choose them. She would never have chosen them. And for a long stretch of the story, she is convinced that their presence must mean something has gone wrong, that perhaps she has misunderstood the Shepherd, or taken a wrong turn, or that this was never the path after all. It is only much later, when she reaches the place she was being led to, that she understands what Sorrow and Suffering were actually doing the entire time. They were not a detour from her formation. They were the shape it took.

WHAT IF THE HARDEST PART ISN'T THE SUFFERI...

Hagar was alone in the wilderness when she named God.

Not Abraham. Not Sarah. Not one of the patriarchs whose names we know from a hundred sermons. Hagar, a servant, pregnant and then pushed out, sitting by a spring in the desert with nothing and no one, is the one who looks at God and gives Him a name that no one else in Scripture uses first. El Roi. The God who sees.

She did not name Him that because someone explained His character to her in a teaching series. She named Him that because, in the middle of being unseen by everyone else in her life, she discovered that God had seen her the entire time. Not from a distance. Not in the abstract. He saw her specifically, in her specific wilderness, and He told her so.

That is where this week's episode of A Summer of Sorrows lives, and it is where this post lives too.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ATTENDED TO AND WITNESSED

There is a difference between being attended to and being witnessed, and most of us have experienced the first far more o...

There is a particular kind of grief that does not get a name.

It is not the grief that comes with a death certificate, a funeral, a sympathy card. It does not come with a meal train. Nobody asks how you are doing in the careful, lowered voice people use for the griefs they recognize. This grief shows up on an ordinary Tuesday, in the middle of an ordinary summer, and it sits down inside you and does not leave. You go to the beach because it is July and that is what you do, and you sit behind your sunglasses, and you watch your children build something in the sand, and the grief sits there with you, unnamed, unwitnessed, and entirely real.

A Summer of Sorrows, the series this blog post grows out of, begins here. Not with a death. With a kind of grief that does not know what season it is. The kind that does not resolve by sundown, or by the next Sunday, or by the time everyone else has moved on to whatever comes next.

THE PSALM THAT DOES NOT TURN

Most of the psalms o...

What to Do When You Don't Know How to Pray Anymore

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There is a particular kind of grief that comes with losing the ability to pray.

Not a sudden loss — not the kind that comes from one devastating moment. The slow kind. The kind where you sit down to pray one morning and notice, with a faint alarm, that the words are not there. And then you sit down the next morning and notice the same thing. And then a week passes, and a month, and what was once as natural as breathing has become something you approach with dread — or stop approaching at all.

If you are in that place right now, I want to begin by saying something important:

The inability to pray in the way you once did is not evidence that prayer has stopped being real. It may be evidence that God is inviting you into a different kind of prayer entirely.

The contemplative tradition — the stream of Christian spirituality that takes seriously the interior life and the long, often painful process of formation — has always k...

What John of the Cross Knew That the Modern Church Forgot

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I found them when I was drowning.

Not dramatically — the way we picture drowning from the outside. Quietly. The way a person drowns when they have been treading water for so long that the effort itself becomes the thing that exhausts them. I was in the darkest season of my life — shunned by a church community I had loved as family, my faith coming apart at every seam I had stitched together, unable to pray in any way that felt coherent, certain that what was happening to me was evidence of something uniquely, specifically wrong with me.

And then I found them.

The ancient witnesses. The ones who had been here before me — in the darkness, in the silence, in the long season where God felt absent and prayer felt like speaking into a void. They had not just survived it. They had written about it. With honesty and precision and a theological depth that the modern church has largely stopped passing on.

Finding them was a...

First Half Faith and Why God Doesn't Leave You There

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There came a point in my life where what I had done for the first eight years of my Christian walk no longer worked in my suffering.

Not because my faith was wrong. Not because God had abandoned me. Not because I had done something to disqualify myself from His grace.

But because the container I had been given — the spirituality I had been formed in — was not built for what I was now carrying.

And nobody told me there was another one coming.

If you have been in a season where the faith that once sustained you has stopped producing what it used to — where the disciplines feel hollow, the answers feel insufficient, and the God you thought you knew seems to have gone quiet — this post is for you.

Because what you are experiencing may not be a failure of faith. It may be an invitation into a deeper one.

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The Faith That Got You Here — And Why It Mattered

The first half of faith is the spirituality most of us wer...

Six Types of Walls — And Why It Matters Which One You're In

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Not all darkness is the same.

And one of the most disorienting — and quietly harmful — things that happens when faith stops working is that we apply the wrong remedy. We treat a dark night of the soul like burnout, and wonder why rest is not helping. We treat a faith crisis like a personal crisis, and wonder why our circumstances improving does not make the questions go away. We treat a blowout like spiritual dryness, and wonder why discipline is making things worse.

The wall has different faces. And knowing which face you are looking at is the beginning of knowing how to stay.

This post is a companion to Episode 2 of the Through the Wall podcast series. If you have not yet listened, you are welcome to start there — or to begin here, and let this be your map.

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Why Finding Your Location Changes Everything

When you are at the wall — when faith feels dry, distant, or broken — the instinct is to work harder a...

When Faith Stops Working the Way It Used To

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There is a particular kind of exhaustion that does not have a name in most Christian circles.

It is not burnout, exactly — though exhaustion is part of it. It is not depression, though the weight of it can feel indistinguishable. It is not a crisis of belief, though you may have begun to wonder if that is what it is.

It is the experience of waking up one day and realizing that faith — the faith you have practiced, built, tended, and sometimes fought for — has stopped producing what it once did.

Prayer feels hollow. Scripture feels distant. Worship feels like going through motions you no longer understand. And God, who once felt present and close, now feels somewhere behind a door that will not open no matter how many times you knock.

If you have found your way to this page, you may be living in that space right now. Or you may be watching someone you love live there. Or you may have been there once and are only now finding lang...

Between Grief and Glory: The Sacred Middle Where God Meets Us

There is a space in the Christian life that few people name and even fewer know how to hold.

It is the space after the prayer has been prayed but before it is answered.
The space after the loss but before new life has taken root.
The space where the old story has ended, yet the new one has not begun.

It is the space between grief and glory.

Many of the women I walk with find themselves here. Faithful. Still loving Jesus. Still showing up. And yet quietly weary. Quietly aching. Quietly wondering whether God still sees them in the middle of what feels unresolved.

This is the sacred middle.

And it is not a detour.

It is formation.

The Liminal Space We Rarely Acknowledge

Between grief and glory is a liminal place. It is unsettled, tender, and often lonely. It does not look like victory. It does not resolve neatly. There is no ribbon tied around it.

In faith spaces, we are often uncomfortable with what cannot be quickly r...