Sharing your story, your messy, wild, unpredictable narrative, is a paradoxical burden. Your desire to share with anyone who will listen envelops you to near suffocation. You think what you have to share is significant, meaningful, maybe even useful. But so are pillows and doormats. You believe the unsettling voice inside that reminds you that you have nothing to share that hasn’t been shared before. In response, you kindly ask that ever present voice to expand on that idea, so you can truly comprehend the full detailed picture of just how much no one cares about your story.

However, there’s a moment. A moment of implacable defiance and courage that creates a space for you to settle down and write. Of course, all you can think about is how many dolphins you have tortured by not cutting up those plastic soda rings, if your phone is actually listening to you, and if you really should count the calories in ketchup. Honestly, you would rather do just about anything than make others uncomfortable or angry because of your beliefs and opinions, and that undoubtedly includes counting the damn ketchup calories.

The choice is simple. Do you shrink back, stay silent, and suffocate under the weight of all that you have to say? Do you dole out parts and pieces of your soul, yet hold back the parts that are soaked in chaos, bad decisions, and cheap beer? Or do you draw strength and bravery from those who have chosen to be legit radical world changers? Do you look inside yourself, the very self that God created in His image, and choose integrity, strength, and authenticity, and sit yourself down to write?

You just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it. – Anne Lamott

My journey, my wilderness, my evolving beliefs are not unlike those of many kindred souls who feel alone, unmoored, and misplaced. There’s a spiritual migration happening in our midst, a quiet yet deafening retreat of those of us who love God fiercely yet are finding that the nonnegotiable belief system that was instilled in us was built with ideological walls, patriarchy, and control. We have always felt it: the tension in the unspoken divide. We are finally breaking down the walls that have kept control of our belief system. We can finally understand and accept that we don’t have to live within those walls, those boundaries, those margins, to call ourselves Christians.

This is not a blog about losing faith. This is a blog about finding it. Finding it in the wild places, in the inconvenient and unexpected corners of ordinary life. I seek and find God in the backyard with my bright eyed and bushy tailed doggies on a warm summer morning, the grass cool and wet underfoot, as the heat approaches with the sunrise. I find Him in the anger that consumes me when I see someone vulnerable treated as disposable and inhuman. I find Him in the middle of perimenopause as I wake up at 2:27am, question every life decision I’ve ever made, then fall asleep 14 minutes before my alarm goes off. I find God in my fellow messy, desperate humans as they turn their Costco cart, a simple convenient food wagon, into an ankle bruising weapon. I see Him on the freeway when I get cut off, probably by a Tesla, for the third time in five hundred feet. I see Him in the warm smile of the Starbucks baristas even though they are overwhelmed by edgy caffeine starved, slightly unhinged patrons. I feel Him everywhere and nowhere and every weird and lovely space in between.

Two thousand years ago, John the Baptist could not be anchored to the temple. He was drawn to the wild, unpredictable rivers, the desolate desert, the gritty and unforgiving grounds, where he found the people. The people that the religious establishment had decided were not worth finding. The marginalized. The desperate. The unhoused. The hungry. The ones who had been told they were too far gone, too unclean, too underprivileged. He did not live by societal and familial expectations. He fled. He leaned into his authenticity. He didn’t lead from a position of power, and he called out the hypocrisy of the establishment without ever trying to make anyone comfortable. I picture his scarred, weathered, dark skin, his ribs showing where the locusts and wild honey barely kept him fed, his eyes wild with something between hunger and conviction. His camel hair vest, shaggy and stained, reeking of sweat, mud, and river water. But there he was anyway, fiercely loyal to Jesus, standing at the edge of the wilderness, ready to battle the powerful and stand up for the marginalized. He was disruptive and counter cultural. Today, he’d be called liberal, progressive, and woke.

John baptized them into new life in a muddy river, the current tugging at bare ankles, while the powerful performed their careful rituals behind ornate walls. The humble cool water, intermingling with stirred up sediment, tears, sin, and shame, purified and redeemed the people. John understood something that the institution did not. He knew that God could not and cannot be held behind walls, ideologies, theologies, dogma, or men. God will not be contained. His spirit seeps through the cracks in those walls. It shows up in the rivers and the desert and flows freely through our hearts.

There is something in John’s story that feels less like ancient history and more like the spiritual migration that is currently on the move. The wilderness he inhabited is much like the tangled, overgrown paths we stumble onto when we realize we cannot live out our own faith inside someone else’s certainty. Navigating these paths can feel like wielding a creased and crumpled stack of MapQuest directions or a coffee-stained atlas with missing pages. It is disorienting and confusing, but simultaneously redeeming and liberating, kind of like Lewis and Clark, I suspect. Which, I believe, were the last ones to actually use an atlas.

This is it. Stories, musings, and myths. It is a record of a spiritual migration, from inside the walls to the openness of the wild, from inherited certainty to hard-won and ever-evolving faith. It is an invitation to anyone who has ever felt stifled by the rules, too untamed for the pew they sat in, too alive for the version of God they were given.

Friend, we are not lost. We are in the unknown, where every corner, every space, is full of everything worth finding. We just need to pay attention.