January 22, 2026
Remember that feeling of the first Monday back at work after the holidays? Did you drag your feet, struggling to get back on the well-trained horse of ruthless productivity? I must have heard the phrase “I’m having a hard time getting going” a dozen times.
(Or perhaps the predictable, or at least visible, nature of work comes as a relief after whatever (joyful?) chaos your holidays held. That, too.)
Anyway, here we are, a month past Christmas and I’m only now gingerly inspecting my own little horse, taking him out for a gentle trot after down time in the stables. (Knowing very little about actual horse care, I cede the limits of my ability to ride this metaphor all the way home.) After a month off my usual writing rhythms, this is my post-holiday Monday back at it.
Let’s be gentle, shall we?
My time off was largely spent being present to people. Was it always easy or fun? (See paragraph 2). But it was right and good.
It’s the kind of epiphany so obvious, once you note it you’re a bit shy to bother mentioning. But I’ll risk looking simple to make it plain: We are made to pay attention to each other. What people need, what allows us to flourish, what opens us to love, to joy, to the psychological space to own our flaws, to move toward change, to accept others across difference—is attention. To be seen, beheld, accepted themselves, as we are.
And to pay others attention is itself deeply satisfying. So much of what we deeply yearn for, connection, belonging, purpose, are gathered up in the simple gift of being attentive to other humans.
Ok, fine.
You know what doesn’t happen when you’re being attentive to other humans?
Getting stuff done.
I felt that keenly over the last month. The time was rightly spent, but what did it cost me? A twenty car pile-up of uncompleted tasks. Tasks stranded on the roadside, crashed over the guardrail, abandoned tasks scattered all over the pavement. I wrote little of note. I decided to call it on two January events I’d planned to host. Didn’t enact a vision or execute a strategy.
All this carnage of work left undone feels like a failure. All that time and nothing to show for it.
Except, I already determined that the time was properly devoted to being present with people. Why the lingering disconnect?
Perhaps what is wrong is not our use of time but our expectations.
You know you can’t spend the same dollar twice, but how often do we expect to be able to use the same time for conflicting purposes? To simultaneously be richly, deeply present yet wildly effective and productive. If we could only jettison the pesky limitations of life as an embodied human! (You’ve thought it too, right? How much more I could squeeze in if I didn’t need sleep?)
But we are finite creatures, gifted with limits. Whatever it is we’re meant to do must, by design, fit within them. Our limits require a choice. When we expect to live as if we could avoid a choice and do it all, as if these limits didn’t exist, of course it chafes; we’re going against the grain of how we’re made.
This holiday season highlighted the required trade-off. Do I want to devote signficant time to being present and attentive to humans: listening well to my spouse and not just talking logistics. Available to my children and not just mad at them for interrupting. Lingering over long meals and glasses of wine with friends. Swapping stories around a campfire. Not rushing to what’s next, not begrudging what it is keeping me from?
I do, I do.
Well, I have to expect to do less.
Not simply do less. But plan be less productive. Intend to accomplish fewer things. Set smaller outcome-based goals. Don’t fight the trade-off, but acknowledge it, accept it, design for it.
What does that mean practically? It’s easiest to answer with my paid work. Simple, I plan for less income. Instead of maximizing, I stop at enough. The unpaid work is harder. What do I do with the tension between allocating sufficient time to presence, and to pursuing dreams? What would be easy is careen into an extreme. If I can’t be all in, just stop.
The hard path, but maybe the way of life, is pluck onward in an entirely unglamorous fashion, a snail pace I can persevere in. Aiming for what I can reasonably create with the limits of the time required to maintain the foundation of who I want to be, including all that marvelous, time-sucking engagement with real humans. Less, slower. Setting that expectation, not an infinite to-do list.
Yet even that requires a return to the stables, one I’ve been stalling.
Today I realized why. Not only the need to allocate time to all those forlorn tasks. Not that this work is a drag. (If so, may as well devote the extra time to lawyering, at least get paid!) Rather, as the horrific scene in Minnesota plays out, a dramatic crescendo, on film, of the past year’s trauma—well, what business do I have generating poetry about trees or reflections on washing dishes? And, as author K.J. Ramsey shared in a recent post describing her own reluctance to write this week: it’s grief.
Of course. There is just. so. much. When you’re grieving something larger than you can hold, pain you cannot change or control, of course you turn down the productivity dial to make space for the sorrow. (Or use work to avoid feeling, which I’m sure we’ve all done our version of—how did that work out?)
Yet life keeps moving, dishes must be washed—and what kind of person do we become when we routinely find grace in such a mundane act? What kind of fire can poetry about trees ignite in our bones? We do not stop living the best way we know how when people we care for hurt. We suit up, respond. Not all of us, probably not most of us, are called to be a priest in the streets inviting ICE agents to the table, sans guns; not many craft protest sleds, or give speeches or write policy.
But Christians each have a role in loving our neighbors, especially our vulnerable ones. Even our enemies, for that matter. Ugh, yeah, that too.
Doing that well over time takes work, the deep work of spiritual formation. By my nature I want to hate my enemy, write them off as sub-human. Again, how does that work out? What happens in me when I feed that impulse? I become what I want to resist. That’s not how I want to live.
I want to be the kind of person who has the character and fortitude to engage this hard work, not consumed by hate or despair, not tempted by apathy or overly dependent on comfort. That doesn’t come naturally—until God forms in me a new kind of person. I can’t manufacture it, but I can tend to my own soul, engage in the kinds of practices that make me available and open to the work of God.
And as I’m formed into the kind of person who can overcome evil with good, I must also discern: what is my role? What is God inviting me into? What does faithful obedience mean here?
And as I have some glimmer of understanding—I do it.
And this act of obedience continues to form me. And I continue to discern. And I continue to respond.
Spiritual formation.
Discernment.
Response.
As we engage in this dance, over and over, each of us in our sphere, God is at work in and through us, and we know more of God through it. In the face of all this grief, there is also this beautiful dance of goodness and joy. We can’t control the pain, but we get to choose to be part of that.
Part of my role is field medic, tending the tent where you might arrive wounded and tired, partnering with God—the real doctor here—to restore your soul and build your muscle for re-entering the world to shoulder your role. Through spiritual direction and retreats, sure, and also by noticing and heralding the goodness, beauty and joy of God, in the ordinary, yes, and also in the (sometimes extraordinary) hard places.
So I will make space to grieve, be attentive to humans, and perhaps write less, but writing is part of my faithful response, so I will keep at it, hoping my words to be as a little lamp you can carry on your way.
