Before you can make your mark on the world, let the world make its mark on you. Be curious. Stay open. Nurture the humility it takes to admit you can get it wrong.
— Rachel Held Evans, Braving the Truth, p. 63
Photo: Étretat, France, June 23, 2026.
This is the heart of what it should mean to be a Christian of any designation: the desire to continue to move and grow and learn and change, even if those things place us in opposition to the person we once were or the beliefs we once held firmly or the testimony we once gave. As we move through space and time, our faith should be in continual evolution. We should always look back at the previous version of ourselves and realize how much we didn’t know then. We should be able to see how far we’ve come in matters of spirituality.
— John Pavlovitz, Worth Fighting For, p. 75
Photo: Étretat, France, June 23, 2026
We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right. That might just be the central message of how spiritual growth happens, yet nothing in us wants to believe it.
If there is such a thing as human perfection, it seems to emerge precisely from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere, especially our own. What a clever place for God to hide holiness, so that only the humble and earnest will find it! A so-called perfect person ends up being one who can consciously forgive and include imperfection rather than one who thinks he or she is totally above and beyond imperfection.
It becomes sort of obvious once we say it out loud. In fact, I would say that the demand for the perfect is the greatest enemy of the good, Perfection is a mathematical or divine concept; goodness is a beautiful human concept that includes us all. People whom we call “good” are always people who have learned how to include contradictions and others, even at the risk of their own proper self-image or their social standing. This is quite obvious in Jesus.
— Richard Rohr, Yes, And…: Daily Meditations, p. 317
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, August 25, 2026
Curiosity is suspect in many Christian circles where people are convinced our faith rests only on following rules. It’s a slippery slope, some of us have been told. When it came to my spirituality, I was taught to seek answers over and above the sacred discipline of asking questions, and this proved detrimental when I became afraid to wonder and dream about God for fear of “straying from the faith.” I’m still not sure what that means. Curiosity has since become a great companion, a trusted friend who meanders along with me in kinship – in both the familiar and the unknown. We both know, Curiosity and I, that so much of God’s beauty is waiting to be explored. These are the paths of discovery that take root in us and eventually become passions, callings, and vocations. In this way, curiosity sometimes even saves us, enlivening us with purpose.
“Questioning is just as vital to awareness as using all our senses,” notes Haines. Questions are a direct reflection of our curiosity, inviting us to keep paying attention and to live as active characters in our own story. Too many have stopped noticing the Spirit because they believe they already have the answers they need. But a holistic and robust faith is a faith that is engaged – a faith that remains curious.
— Kat Armas, Sacred Belonging, p. 84-85
Photo: Field at Giverny, France, June 16, 2026
And lest you think I count myself finished, know this: When I was a Bible-thumping, church-going, know-it-all Republican, God used bleeding-heart, politically correct, question-everything liberals to teach me to be human, to challenge my notions of who the enemy is. But now that I’m a bleeding-heart, politically correct, question-everything liberal, God insists on using Bible-thumping, church-going, know-it-all Republicans to teach me to be human, to challenge my notions of who the enemy is.
God, it seems, is rather stubbornly committed to extracting me from the notion that this is all about being right.
— Rachel Held Evans, Braving the Truth, p. 62
Photo: Front walk to Château de Chantilly, France, June 25, 2026
There are a lot of things I cannot be certain of, but I am certain that God is not fragile. Nor is God in the business of creating subjugated people with no liberty to question or to wonder. Arguing not only with God but also with God’s sacred text is a path toward our liberation, a way of pushing back against the forces of injustice that plague us.
Humans are thinking and feeling creatures, passionate at times, and the Spirit of God invites all of that – all the critical thinking, all the deep engagement, all the reasoning together – into the relationship we have together. This intimacy, this authenticity, goes to the very heart of what it is to know and be known by Spirit.
If you can bare your angst, your frustrations, your disagreements, and your dread to someone, yet they are unshaken, what sort of healing and liberation might be found with this person? How much more so should this be true with the divine? To argue with God is to belong to God; it is to embrace a love that surpasses all understanding – and be transformed by it.
— Kat Armas, Sacred Belonging, p. 62
Photo: Giverny, France, June 16, 2026
I thought God wanted to use me to show gay people how to be straight. Instead God used gay people to show me how to be Christian.
I thought the world needed my answers, but as it turns out, I needed the world’s questions. I needed to learn how to doubt well, listen better, and be humbled by how little I know. I needed to discover that evangelicalism is just one table in Christ’s banquet hall, the Great Cloud of Witnesses far more sprawling and diverse than I’d ever imagined.
— Rachel Held Evans, Braving the Truth, p. 61
Photo: Dipladenia flowers, June 13, 2026
“Not all who wander are lost,” writes J.R.R. Tolkien. You’re not lost, you’re right where you belong on this wandering path. It might be disorienting, there may be danger, but you’re not lost. You’re on the right journey. It’s just a different path than you were expecting when you were handed a brand of faith and told to cultivate and protect it at all costs. You’re becoming someone who is more loving, someone who is healing, who is more acquainted with the fragility and belovedness of us all. The deliverance that’s waiting on the other side of the wilderness isn’t a tidier, nicer version of you with new and better answers: your deliverance was always going to be more Love.
— Sarah Bessey, Field Notes for the Wilderness, p. 43
Photo: Bluebell Trail, Bull Run Regional Park, Virginia, April 3, 2026
The work of repentance is, in many ways, the work of looking outside ourselves, looking with an empathetic eye at what we have done, letting it matter to us, and trying earnestly to figure out how we can both meaningfully address it and ensure that it never happens again. This is, in some ways, an act of tenderness, of extending ourselves to care for others, of giving ourselves the time and attention we deserve to grow, of investing in our own learning and capacity to heal.
Because repentance is, I believe, in part, a kind of self-care. When we do the work, we give attention to our own broken places, our own reactionary impulses, our own careless ignorance. And it’s a way of saying, “Hey, self, you need some attention. Let’s give you some help becoming the kind of person you want to be.”
— Danya Ruttenberg, On Repentance and Repair, p. 59
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, January 10, 2026
I am still learning this new life, and in many ways it still feels strange to me. I’ve begun filling the space that loss created around me. I can color the space around me however I want — finally — because now there is room. What I’m discovering is as surprising to me as the caterpillar’s transformation: life on the other side of loss is not only livable but may be better, richer, more meaningful. I am more of myself for having gone through this strange and painful transformation, like entering the darkness and coming out with wings.
— Maggie Smith, Keep Moving, p. 173
Photo: Sunrise over lake, South Riding, Virginia, December 17, 2025