Welcome, new friends! This substack is a little internet corner where I share poetry and whatever I’m currently musing on. I’ve also been trying to share updates about my master’s of theology journey at Regent College in Vancouver. Here’s the first reflection on my second term, and I’ll be back next week with a poem. I’m grateful you’re here.
This past Friday the Winter Olympics kicked off in Italy, and I also had an article published in Christianity Today about what it’s like to watch the Olympics as someone with chronic pain.
I have to freak out a little bit about that sentence because I love the work of CT and have dreamed of being published by them. I never thought I would get to do so while writing about something I love so much (the Olympics, not so much the chronic pain), but I keep forgetting that God often gives us more than we ask for.
The timing is a little bit ironic, though. For one thing, it came out on a week when my pain levels were a bit lower than the baseline. Which is probably not ironic; it’s appropriate. But I still had to laugh wryly to myself that every time I am tempted to get to romantic about what suffering has taught me, I am reminded of the sharp reality of it.
It’s also ironic because last week I also submitted a spiritual autobiography as a class assignment (I know, how cool can school get?), and the thrust of it was that I’ve been living in the story of meeting God in pain for a decade now, and I’m beginning to wrap my mind around the fact that it’s not my only or even primary story anymore.
This class is a history of Christian spirituality, and my professors, a wonderful husband and wife team, call it a twin pilgrimage: a pilgrimage through time and a pilgrimage through our own personal journeys. As we learn about the past, they want us to also grow more attentive to the way God is working in our lives in the present. Hence the spiritual autobiography.
I wrote mine twice. In the first draft, I told the story of developing chronic pain, the spiritual darkness that confronted me with, the surprising ways I met God in it. Writing that took me forty minutes. I've gotten used to this story. I've told it many times. And as soon as I finished, I felt a nudge. Go deeper.
I resisted, squirming a little like a hangry toddler, but I knew the Spirit was right. (I mean, duh.) It shouldn’t be a rehearsed thing. And it shouldn’t end where I was at two years ago, which my original draft basically did. I needed to articulate what God might be doing now, in all the messiness. I don’t know the narrative yet, which is why I needed to start putting words to it.
So I restarted the autobiography, this time with a memory from last spring. I had gotten this image during a time of spiritual direction with a friend: Jesus grabbing my hands with an exuberance I don't normally associate with him and saying to me, “I am doing a new thing.”
As I recounted that memory in my second draft, I started to cry. At the time, I had initially received those words as a promise. I was dealing with intense anxiety and wondering if there would ever be a light at the end of the tunnel.
But even then, I sensed that it was bigger than that. “I sensed,” I wrote, “that I am coming to rely on that story as a crutch. There is more to my life with God than that chapter, as hard-won and formative as it has been.”
That made me weep then, when I first sensed God saying that to me, and again as I remembered it last week. I think I had begun to harbor a secret fear that God was done with me. I had gotten my dramatic story and that was it. And now I would have decades of a kind of spiritual stagnancy. I think half of me was afraid that God had pulled back, and half of me was afraid that it was my fault, that there was some obstacle in me to growth.
But this idea that God was doing a new thing in my life, that he wasn't letting me stay complacent in old lessons and old battles and old encouragement, that he cares enough about me to keep drawing me deeper into his life—that cracked open all those fears and exposed them as the counterfeits they are.
The thing is, though, the past few years have not felt at all like growth. I have dealt with more anxiety and confusion than ever before, and in many ways that is much harder for me than physical pain. When you’re in pain, you can be a noble victim. When you’re confused and afraid and fumbling along, well, there’s no nobility in that.
I wrote in my autobiography: “What I have learned from this season is that God is still with me even when I am very confused. When I make wrong decisions. When I do not know my own heart. It is brutally humbling. I am not the wise sage I thought I was. I do not have it all together. I now feel what it is to need God not only because of external suffering but also because of internal mess. He’s proven to me he’ll meet me in pain, and now I know that he’ll meet me in confusion (which, for me, is harder).”
I think you could look at my life and think that the “new thing” God is doing is this international move, this big degree, these new people and places and opportunities, the coming true of many dreams. But I felt Jesus grab my hands and say I’m doing a new thing, present tense, currently active, before all of that.
God was doing a new thing before it felt exciting or joyful or visible, even to me. Maybe all these things that actually feel new and fun are the fruit of the real new thing, which was an uprooting in the claustrophobic dark.
When I was confirmed in the Anglican church two summers ago, a friend told me, “Things will be different now. You’ll see.” By temperament and upbringing, I am suspicious of words of prophecy or mountaintop moments, and I waited with deep hesitation to see what this experience might mean for me.
Then came the confusion and anxiety, the sources of which I’ll leave vague for now, and even as I felt tossed to the waves, I also felt something else. My friend’s words rang in my mind. Even on the hardest days, something deep in me stirred and said: This is proof of God working. This anxiety is the dust cloud of his footsteps as he walks deeper into my life. He loves me so much that he will not let me stay content in my old methods of coping, in my oh-so-comfortable idols.
I sensed that God was letting this confusion persist because this is where I was—where I still am—forced to meet him. My friend’s words primed me to see my unsettledness as evidence of the Spirit uprooting weeds and tilling me so new seeds can grow.
We talk a lot at Regent about how we should stop using machine metaphors for humans. We are living things. So we should look to living things as the images by which to understand our lives—trees and tulips and even the growth of volcanoes into islands. When we are tired, we are not computers that need a software update, as if something in us is broken or inferior. We are spring flowers, who have seasons of obvious blooming and also seasons of browning and wilting and seasons of resurrection under the surface of the soil. The disruptions and frailties and seeming failures are natural and necessary and generative.
So here I am, trying not to wrap up this season in a tidy bow that isn’t true but also trying to stay awake to how God is moving and where he is in my life. More to come, I’m sure, on all of this.
For now, one practical update is that I have decided to switch my concentration from biblical studies to interdisciplinary, primarily so that I have space to write a thesis. It will mean fewer language courses and less exegesis training, which makes me sad, but I'm still going to use my electives to get as much language work as I can. My various questions about embodiment, suffering, and pain have begun to coalesce in a way that feels like I have enough to really dig into, that they are worth sustained, focused exploration. I have finite time and money for grad studies, which means hard decisions, but I (finally) feel good about this one. I’m starting to see my other interests in science and art come into the conversation, which is exciting and unexpected and a reminder that no interest is wasted. More to come on this as well!
In Other Words…
Book Reviews 📚
Even though I’ve been a bit MIA on here, I’ve gotten some book reviews written! I’ve linked to them in the titles. None of my classes this term, sadly, require me to read full so these have been personal explorations, plus my attempt to live up to my 2026 resolution to read more fiction.
Gender as Love: A Theological Account of Human Identity, Embodied Desire, and Our Social Worlds by Felipe do Vale | 4 stars
solid philosophical groundwork for a theory of gender that incorporates both biological and social realities; my quibble is that it isn’t actually very helpful practically (yet)
Embodied Hope: A Theological Meditation on Pain and Suffering by Kelly M. Kapic | 4 stars
beautiful pastoral and theological reflections on specifically physical pain for those who suffer and those who care for them; the chapter on confession is one I’ll be thinking about for a while
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro | 2 stars
great prose but it struck me as a facade of sophistication over a poorly built structure that doesn’t know what it’s trying to be
That’s all for now, friends. I can’t wait to see what blooms from our various physical and spiritual winters.
to staying awake—
Aberdeen
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