Confessions of Inconsistency

Public writing will make a hypocrite of anyone, including me.

Last week I extolled the virtue of consistency, in writing as in life. But after publishing that post, I had to admit that I’ve been anything but consistent in my own writing life this summer. Last Friday, after returning from the sixth week of summer travel, I could see that my plans—for small, daily efforts in the patterned upheaval—had mostly failed. (Do not look at my Instagram feed to find the July habit tracker I did not fill out.)

I seem to be only as consistent as my life’s consistent and familiar infrastructure.

Wake me up at the same time and in the same bed every morning, and you will follow me following a consistent morning routine. Coffee. The Psalms. Journalling. Exercise. Taking my vitamins. Making my bed. Soon it will be 9am, and I’ll be sitting at my desk, praying the morning office and picking up a pen to begin the day’s work. These routines don’t guarantee a fruitful day of work, but they do at least put me in the path of it. As Anne Lamott has so often said, writing is the simple act of getting your butt in the chair. If you butt does its proper work, your mind can follow suit.

But keep me up late, then plop me in a hotel (or Airbnb or college dormitory), all bets for consistency are off. This is to say that if you move the predictable arrangement of the daily “furniture” of my life, I’m a blind woman set loose in a maze. To the extent I practice consistency in any area of my life, it’s generally because I’ve created an invisible infrastructure of support. That support includes a schedule, a morning routine, but it also stares at my in the form of material things like my running shoes, my cluttered desk, my analogue planner. My community, too, also keep my consistent without saying a word.

In my home environment, I have a better memory of who I am and what I’m called to do. It’s why travel feels especially harrowing at times. I grow untethered from my anchoring routines, routines which don’t define me but do keep me actively surrendered to the God who is working in me to will and to work for his good pleasure.

I wish I were more consistent as the ground shifted beneath my feet. I wish I could manage the flexibility to practice consistency—and constancy—on the road. I could wonder if this is a moral fault of mine. Or maybe we are all more susceptible to disruption than we think.

On my last flight home, I pulled another magazine from my backpack (because this is generally when I’m catching up on back issues of The Atlantic and Comment, Plough and Image). In the April 2026 issue of The Atlantic, McKay Coppins, a suburban dad of four kids, chronicles his “year as a degenerate gambler.” Opposed to gambling because of his Mormon beliefs and commitments, he nonetheless took the proposed $10,000 his editor offered to him for his journalistic exploration of the sports-betting industry. When he floated this idea to his bishop, his bishop told him to be careful.

In a matter of weeks, Coppins’s behavior was already becoming addictive. The “journalistic exercise” was starting to take over his life. By week seven, he began noticing the late nights and the increasing secrecy. He was placing bets inside the darkened kitchen pantry. “In truth,” he writes, “I was beginning to wonder about what [my wife] had said to me at church [about becoming addicted]. I had always told people that I didn’t have an addictive personality, believing that to be so. Now I had to consider a different possibility. Maybe I had simply constructed a life with strong enough guardrails that I’d never had to test the premise.”

“What would happen to me, I wondered, if those guardrails were removed?”

Coppins doesn’t detail that kinds of guardrails he means, but I can imagine they could look like the habits and practices that constitute a rule of life. Maybe it was consistently putting his phone away after dinner. Maybe it was consistently going out for breakfast once a week with his wife. Maybe it was consistently meeting up with people from his community, talking about something other than the weekend’s NFL games. Coppins had imagined himself to be disciplined, sober-minded, and sensible. But then he realized: with just a few tweaks to his habits, he could spiral into a version of himself he didn’t recognize.

Reading his words, I recognized the same weakness in myself. I am not sensible and self-disciplined most of the time. I am simply reliant on the structures I’ve built (and the Spirit of God) to support my better desires for sensibility and self-discipline.

It is Monday morning as I finish this—and I’m at my desk, beginning a day of overdue work. (If you’re expecting an email from me, I am getting to it!) I am not as consistent as I want to be in any area of my life. Not in marriage or friendship. Not in my life with God or my work with words. But I am reminded, at least on this day, that consistency is something practiced. It is not the game of the long shot—but the long haul.

Consistency is a habit of realism, which means you know yourself well enough to know you need support structures for your best intentions. You need friends to bear witness to your real life and cheer you on when cheering is required. Most of all, you need God to do the work you can’t do on your own. Again and again, you place yourself there: “in the path of transformation,” as the late Dallas Willard put it. Or, as Martin Laird writes Into the Silent Land, you cultivate the disposition “to allow something to take place.” Consistency isn’t control but consent. Submission to slog and self-honesty—and also to occasional splendor.