Two steps forward, one step back
The needed change within us is God’s work, not ours. The demand is for an inside job, and only God can work from the inside.
—Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline
Every spring, the tree in the corner of my backyard sprouts dozens of seedlings at the bottom of its trunk. Sometimes known as volunteers, adventitious buds, or my favorite scientific term, suckers, these offspring grow not from seed, but from tissue in the roots at the base or even some distance from the tree. Around the middle of May each year, I hand one of my kids a pair of garden clippers and send him out to cut the shoots down to the ground, not only because the masses of leaves and stems clumped around the trunk are unsightly, but also because suckers are unhealthy for a tree, diverting nutrients and energy away from the crown.
After the errant suckers have been clipped to the ground, the back corner of my yard looks pristine and manicured, and I am pleased. But it never fails. A month or so after the pruning, a new crop of suckers has already begun to poke through the woodchips. After two months, they have all but obscured the base of the trunk again, and it’s time to repeat the pruning.
Like the tree in my backyard, we, too, need to prune and prune again, especially when it comes to our own metaphorical “suckers.” The branches we cut because we deem them unnecessary or even detrimental to our spiritual growth will often sprout again, sometimes even more vigorously than before. We become frustrated and discouraged when we realize that the progress we thought we made isn’t necessarily permanent. We are humbled, knowing the journey toward uncovering our true selves is often a halting, stutter-step process. Sometimes it feels like we are walking two steps forward, one step back. Sometimes it feels more like two steps forward, three steps back.
The ancient Israelites were more than a little familiar with this cycle of spiritual progression and regression. Throughout their forty-year journey in the wilderness they wrestled with idolatry. Their idols were their most persistent branches, the “suckers” that, when cut from their lives, only cropped up again and again. The most obvious example of the Israelites’ struggle with idolatry comes from Exodus 32, when, impatient with Moses’ slow return from the mountaintop where he was convening with God, they begged second-in-command Aaron to make new gods to worship. Aaron was all too quick to comply, fashioning an idol in the shape of a golden calf from the earrings the Israelites handed over to him.
The golden calf may be the most infamous instance of idolatry in the Old Testament, but it’s far from the only one. Even after the Israelites crossed the Jordan River and entered into the Promised Land, and even after the Lord ensured their victory over Jericho, they still fell prey to idolatry. Despite the fact that God had warned them not to hoard the gold, silver, bronze, and iron plundered from Jericho for themselves, one man couldn’t help himself. Achan swiped a beautiful robe, 200 silver coins, and a bar of gold and, instead of dedicating the riches to God’s treasury as the Lord had commanded, he buried them beneath his own tent.
Meanwhile, Joshua was mystified as to why God suddenly appeared to have turned against the Israelites. Soundly defeated in a battle they expected to win, Joshua cried out to God, “Oh, Sovereign LORD, why did you bring us across the Jordan River if you are going to let the Amorites kill us?” (Josh. 7:7 NLT).
It was only then that the leader learned his people had fallen prey to the lures of idolatry once again. The Israelites “have taken some of the devoted things; they have stolen, they have lied, they have put them with their own possessions” (v. 11) God explained to Joshua. That is why the Israelites have been defeated and why they have lost courage, God continues. “They turn their backs and run because they have been made liable to destruction” (v. 12).
They have been made liable to destruction. We need to pay attention to this, because identifying that which makes us liable to destruction is a critical part of the journey toward uncovering our true selves. As we still our bodies and minds, look hard at our false selves and our deepest desires, and continue to prune to an open center, we begin to see more clearly the idols and temptations that tax our souls, prevent us from living most fully and completely into our true selves, and draw us away from intimate relationship with God. This is a good time to ask ourselves some hard questions: What habits distract me and distance me from God? What weakens me and diminishes my trust in him? What fears cause me to lose courage, to falter, to flee?
For the Israelites—particularly Achan in this story—greed and a desire for power and control made them liable to destruction. And beneath their greed and desire for power and control was distrust. Achan distrusted God. He piled up treasures for himself because he did not trust in God’s protection. Achan lived out of scarcity, rather than out of abundance. He tried to assure his own livelihood and future because he didn’t trust that God would provide for him. His desire for power and control and his lack of trust in God made Achan liable to destruction, and his idolatry in turn made his fellow Israelites liable to destruction as well. Our sins can destroy not only ourselves but those around us.
An idol is anything that takes the place of God in our lives. This means idols can take an infinite variety of forms, from material wants like that gorgeous brick Tudor with the sprawling lawn and in-ground pool that just went up for sale three streets over, to more intangible desires like status, recognition, success, achievement, fame, control, or approval. A job can become an idol. Food, alcohol, or drugs can become idols. A relationship can become an idol. Timothy Keller says, “An idol is whatever you look at and say, in your heart of hearts, ‘If I have that, then I’ll feel my life has meaning, then I’ll know I have value, then I’ll feel significant and secure.’”1 We have high expectations of our idols.
Idolatry is also insidious. An idol can weave its tendrils so subtly into your life, you may not even recognize it for what it is. For instance, my idolatry of success and achievement often masquerades as motivation, productivity, and the pursuit of excellence. This is not to say that motivation, productivity, or even a desire to achieve always signal a problem with idolatry, but simply that awareness of our own red flags can help us identify idolatry before it gets a stranglehold on our lives. When I look hard at my relentless productivity and busyness, I see they are actually by-products of a deeper desire to be successful, recognized, known, and, above all, loved.
Often more easily recognizable than the idols themselves, the by-products of our idols are the first clues that the branches we thought we pruned for good have sprouted again. Let me give you an example. I recently had dinner with two successful writer friends. Both are published authors. Both have substantial platforms and are well connected with some of the movers and shakers in the Christian publishing industry. I enjoyed chatting with them over cheesecake, but later, as I lay in bed replaying bits and pieces of the evening’s conversation in my head, I felt a familiar sinking sensation yawn open in the pit of my stomach.
Suddenly I thought of a line from an Emily Dickinson poem: “I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too?”2 and I found myself chanting it over and over, mocking myself for my self-perceived inadequacies. It was, in short, a full-on pity party going on in my bed. When I thought about my friends’ platforms, connections, and achievements, I felt very small in comparison. Very inconsequential. Very nobodyish.
And very envious.
Envy and jealousy are by-products of my idolatry. These feelings are like neon signs flashing “Danger! Danger!” When envy and jealousy clench at my gut, I know I’m getting too cozy with the idols of success, achievement, and the desire to be known. When I start to keep a scoreboard in my head of another author’s Amazon rank or caliber of speaking gigs or number of readers or who she got to endorse her book, and I subsequently begin to feel envious or jealous because I don’t measure up, I know it’s time to take a hard look at my heart. As unpleasant as it is to come face-to-face with envy, jealousy, and other negative emotions, the silver lining is that the ugly offspring of idolatry can help us see when we need to retrieve the pruning shears, strip back the insidious, persistent suckers, and re-center ourselves in Christ once again.
Hustle, busyness, distraction, and anxiety are also by-products of my idolatry. When I find myself saying “yes” to every professional invitation to speak or write, filling my calendar with events, activities, and obligations, and running myself ragged with a mile-long to-do list, I know it’s time to take a deep breath and a step back. Hustle mode is a red flag, a sign I need to take some time in solitude and quiet, to look hard at my priorities, and to ask myself what I am trying to achieve with all my self-important busyness.
Even the ways in which I use social media can signal that I am veering dangerously close to idolatry. “In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office,” observed Henry David Thoreau in Life without Principle. “You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.”3
Thoreau wrote those words nearly 200 years ago, but his observation is still relevant today. In other words, do we find ourselves constantly turning outward to seek affirmation and approval from others? Thoreau was talking about written correspondence, but social media makes this temptation that much easier for us in the twenty-first century. Constantly scrolling social media can be a sign that I am desperately seeking affirmation from my peers. When I find myself counting likes on a post or followers on a page, basing my sense of self-worth on social media engagement, or, even worse, monitoring how many likes my peers’ posts have received and comparing myself to them, I know my social media use has veered from the realm of pleasure and entertainment into a habit that is making me liable to destruction.
It’s not fun to look honestly at our weaknesses and flaws. It can be demoralizing and frustrating to identify our idols and temptations, to root out that which makes us liable to destruction. But it’s also some of the most important work we will do on this journey toward wholeness. Naming our weaknesses, flaws, failures, and inabilities and calling out our idols ultimately creates space for us to move closer to Christ.
Patience and Perseverance
So here’s the question: Once we are able to identify and recognize the by-products of our idolatry, as well as the idols themselves, how do we begin to dismantle that which makes us liable to destruction? While the entire responsibility of transformation doesn’t fall on our shoulders, we do have an important part to play in our journey toward wholeness. We participate in what God is doing in us and through us. As Richard Rohr says, the true self “is a house built on rock (Matt. 7:25), which does not mean it does not need constant maintenance, cleaning, and refinishing. The True Self is not the perfect self. It merely participates in the One who is.”4 So how do we participate in the transformative work God is doing in us? How do we keep the soul- and spirit-draining suckers—the shoots and branches that divert vital nutrients and which we have already pruned away—from sprouting again and again?
I wish I could say there is a quick and easy solution. Alas, there is not. Once again, we take our cue from the gardener.
Gardening expert Lee Reich, author of The Pruning Book, notes that the only effective way to eliminate suckers and reduce their opportunism is to stay vigilant and be persistent. “Keep on suckering,” Reich advises. “Every year, even two to three times a year,” cut back the shoots that sprout at the base of the tree.5 If you are patient and persevere, eventually the tree will produce fewer and fewer suckers each year until finally, the root tissue at the base of the trunk will scar over and stop producing new shoots altogether.
Let’s be honest; this is not the solution we want to hear, right? We want the quick fix, the magic formula. But in spiritual transformation, as in gardening, there is no fast and easy remedy. There is only patience, perseverance, and faith in the process. We participate in the pruning—we bring our weaknesses, failures, and flaws into the presence of Christ—and we put measures in place that will both loosen the idol’s grasp on our lives and support our spiritual growth.
Let me give you an example from my own life. As I mentioned, I’ve identified social media, particularly Facebook, as something that, when I let it get out of hand, has the potential to make me liable to destruction. Social media fuels my idols—it makes me more likely to compare myself with my peers and to seek approval and affirmation from others. The bright lights of social media often blind me to my primary identity as a beloved child of God.
As a writer, connecting with readers online is something I enjoy, and it’s an important part of my platform and book marketing. At the same time, it’s also easy to let social media get the best of me, so I’ve had to take measures to keep the negative impact to a minimum. For example, last fall I deleted my Facebook app from my smartphone, so I don’t have access to Facebook when I am away from my laptop. And last winter, as I mentioned earlier, I fasted from all social media for six weeks during Lent (which proved to be much more challenging than I had anticipated). I also try to limit my social media use on the weekends, especially on Sundays. These steps may sound simple, even a bit silly, but they’ve worked. Slowly, over time, I have decreased my dependence on social media and the time I spend there, and as a result, I am much less likely to suffer from its negative effects on my life.
As my friend Lynn so wisely observed, “We tend to leave opportunities in our lives to be tempted by our idols.” For a long time alcohol was a big idol for Lynn. “I had to take concrete steps to renounce it,” she says, which included disposing of all the alcohol in her house, attending AA meetings for a while, not frequenting bars, and seeking God’s help through prayer-journaling. Lynn put measures in place that not only reduced opportunities for the branch she cut to grow back, but also encouraged her remaining branches—her God-given gifts—to grow in the direction God was leading.
Telling a friend or loved one about your particular struggle with idolatry can help make you less liable to destruction as well. Ask someone to hold you accountable. For example, last year at my church’s Ash Wednesday service, we were invited to write the sin we were struggling with on a small slip of paper. The papers were collected and contained in vases on the altar until Easter Sunday, when they were burned in a bonfire during the sunrise service. Last year I wrote “my addiction to social media” on the slip of paper. Although it was a private exchange between God and me, simply naming the sin and knowing my paper was among those in the vase on the altar held me accountable. I also announced my social media fast publicly on Facebook and Instagram the day before I started, and I told my husband and kids about the fast. I knew I would be less likely to peek at my accounts if there was a risk of getting caught.
Idolatry is insidious. Like the persistent suckers at the base of a tree, our idols can be relentless. Just when we think we’ve rid ourselves of them for good, they sprout again, which is why it’s so important to think carefully about the practices and habits that can help inhibit regrowth, as well as the people in our lives who can support and encourage us along the way.
New Directions
Gardener Jake Hobson notes that once a tree is stripped down to its basic framework with the “unnecessary clutter” discarded, “the next step is to train the remaining side branches into place.”6 The gardener ties the branches that are left with twine or parcel string in the direction he or she wants them to grow. Some branches, Hobson notes, will be more flexible than others, and flexibility can be affected by the season (branches are suppler during the spring and summer, when sap is flowing through the plant). Thicker branches may need to be splinted in order to redirect their growth, and some branches, says Hobson, may be too thick and rigid to train at all. The solution in these cases is to cut the branch and retrain the resulting growth instead.
The metaphor is a rich one when we apply it to our spiritual lives. Think, for example, about the role of the twine and the splint in retraining tree branches to grow in a particular direction. In other words, what practices or spiritual disciplines can we put in place that will both support our spiritual growth and curb our tendencies toward idolatry?
When we hear the term spiritual discipline, we often think of ancient rituals like fasting, honoring the Sabbath, the Benedictine practice of lectio divina, or the Ignatian practice of the daily examen. I have explored many of these disciplines and found them to be spiritually fruitful, but I’d also argue that even an ordinary chore or routine can be transformed into an unconventional spiritual discipline of sorts. At different points in my life, running, weeding, painting walls and trim, and walking the dog have all served as rich spiritual practices that have helped draw me closer to God. These disciplines, even when they don’t look “spiritual” on the outside, can serve as the twine and the splint, supporting us and helping us to retrain our remaining healthy branches in the direction God is leading us. “By themselves, spiritual disciplines can do nothing; they can only get us to the place where something can be done,” says Richard Foster. “They are God’s means of grace . . . the means by which we place ourselves where he can bless us.”7
One of my favorite unconventional spiritual disciplines is what the Japanese call shinrin-yoku, or “forest bathing” (although, since I live in Nebraska, it might more accurately be called “prairie bathing”)—the practice of spending time in the forest or in nature generally. Shinrin-yoku was first developed in Japan during the 1980s and has become an important part of preventive health care and healing in Japanese medicine.8 Apparently the Japanese have known for quite some time what Western scientists are only beginning to substantiate now, which is the fact that spending time in nature is good for us. It lowers our blood pressure and reduces cortisol levels. It increases the cancer-fighting white blood cells and allows the prefrontal cortex part of our brains to rest, which kicks in the brain’s default mode network.
Remember when we talked about the importance of directed rest in chapter 1? As it turns out, spending time in nature—even as little as twenty-five minutes in a city park or green space9—encourages our brains to enter into a state of directed rest, which is good not only for our cognitive functioning and creativity, but also for our souls. The activation of the default mode network “is what enables us to imagine other perspectives and scenarios, imagine the future, remember the past, understand ourselves and others, and create meaning from our experiences,” observes science journalist Carolyn Gregoire.10 In other words, we are able to see our true selves and our reasons for being more clearly when we are in a state of directed rest.
Of course, spiritual disciplines—the metaphorical twine and splint that support the branches we want to grow—are effective only to the degree we use them. Being in nature is one of the primary ways in which I connect with God and where I most often sense his presence, yet taking time to get outdoors, notice my surroundings, and appreciate the uniqueness and beauty of God’s creation is one of the first things I neglect when I let busyness get the best of me. It’s easy for me to forget all about the importance of a stroll around the lake or five minutes on a park bench when I insist on spinning as fast as the world demands.
Just recently I was reminded of the importance of shinrin-yoku in my life, and what happens when I neglect it. It was a Monday evening—time for soccer practice and my night to drive the carpool. I pulled up to the curb in front of Dakota and Cole’s house—Rowan’s friends and soccer teammates—and lightly tapped my horn. Seeing no movement inside, I told Rowan to run up the front walk and knock on the front door to retrieve his friends.
“No one’s answering!” he called down to me, shrugging.
“Knock again, louder this time,” I yelled out the passenger window over the steady hum of the car engine. My hands tightened on the steering wheel, and I felt my pulse begin to quicken. We were going to be late, and I hate being late for anything, even something as unimportant as a YMCA youth league soccer practice.
Rowan knocked again. Still no answer. I motioned him back to the car, but just as he was pulling on his seat belt, I saw the front door swing open. Dakota and Cole’s mom stepped onto the porch and leaned over the railing. “What’s going on? Are you here to pick up the boys? It’s my night . . . I was just leaving!” she called down, clearly puzzled.
She was right. Monday is her night to drive the three boys to soccer practice. For the past two months she’s driven Monday nights and I’ve driven Thursdays, and yet there I was, sitting frantic and flummoxed outside her house on the wrong night.
The soccer carpool mix-up was a wake-up call to bench myself. Literally. I hadn’t realized until that moment that I’d been neglecting my daily practice of bench-sitting and forest bathing. I have a lot on my plate these days—book writing, speaking engagements, a part-time job, shuttling kids to an endless lineup of soccer games and cross country meets and tennis practice, and squeezing housework and errands in wherever I can. Focused on simply getting through my myriad responsibilities each day, it had been more than two weeks since I’d settled into five minutes of quiet on my far side of the wilderness. As the boys piled into the backseat and I sped off toward soccer practice, I knew I needed to still myself, even as the world continued to spin around me.
The very next evening I was back at my bench by the path. As I sat, I watched two goldfinches feast on coneflower in the ravine, yellow feathers flashing amid swaying stalks. A red-bellied woodpecker tapped a staccato beat, bobbing up a nearby tree trunk, pausing every few inches to prod at the bark. I noticed the leaves of the ginkgo tree were just beginning to turn. In a few weeks the grass would be carpeted in gold.
I remember who I am in this quiet place on the far side of the wilderness. I hear God’s voice here, in the wind lifting the leaves, in the tap of a woodpecker’s beak on bark. I feel God’s touch here, in the sun, warm on my hair; in the breeze, gentle on my face. This quiet, this stillness, this green and gold, these are God’s love letters to me. “Only in returning to me and resting in me will you be saved,” the Holy One reminds me (Isa. 30:15 NLT). I return to this bench and I rest, remembering that I am blessed and beloved.
Trust in the Slow Work of God
If you’re a “make it happen” kind of person like me, you may forget from time to time that the responsibility for spiritual transformation isn’t all yours. In all your pruning and shaping and retraining and disciplining, you could begin to think that transformation is all up to you. Let me remind you: it’s not. God does the work of transformation in us; we show up and try to provide the circumstances in which God can best do his work.
After I returned from my trip to Italy, I worried that what God had begun in me under the Tuscan sun would not continue in my everyday, ordinary life in Nebraska. I worried that the invitation into relationship and intimacy I’d received and begun to answer in Italy would be lost bit by bit amid laundry, to-do lists, deadlines, and dentist appointments, until nothing but a faint memory, like a fogged image in an antique mirror, remained. I didn’t trust my ability to keep the spark lit that God had ignited in my heart. More importantly, I wasn’t convinced God would continue to fan that spark into an enduring flame.
Less than three weeks after I returned to Nebraska, I was back on a plane, this time flying with my family to New England to celebrate my parents’ fiftieth anniversary. I’d brought my Bible, and during the flight, I read these words from Philippians, a verse I’d read numerous times before: “And I am certain that God, who began the good work within you, will continue his work until it is finally finished on the day when Christ Jesus returns” (Phil. 1:6 NLT).
In the past, I’d always understood these words as a promise related to my vocation as a writer. I interpreted the verse to mean that since God had given me the gift of and the passion for writing, he would nurture that gift and ensure a fruitful harvest (i.e., successful books). To me this was a verse about outcomes. I see now, though, that this is a myopic understanding of Paul’s words. The truth is, God’s plans and his vision are always far bigger than we can possibly imagine. When I read Paul’s words to the Philippians as we winged our way from Nebraska to New England, I understood this “good work” was much more than my next book or my success as a writer. Paul reminded me that God is in the business of transformation and relationship.
God himself extends the invitation into intimacy. God himself ignites the spark in our hearts and keeps the flame burning. And God himself, who begins the good work in us, will continue his work from now until the end of our time on earth. We needn’t clutch tight-fisted in fear, anxious that what has been started will evaporate like mist off a pond’s surface on a cool autumn morning. God is in control of this process. He is the Inviter. He is the Igniter. And he can be trusted not only to continue but to complete what he begins.
That day on the airplane I remembered a moment that had taken place many months earlier, long before my trip to Italy. One night, on the edge of sleep, I heard seven words reverberate in my head, clear as day, almost as if they had been uttered out loud. I hadn’t been praying. As far as I can remember, I hadn’t even been thinking about anything in particular. Yet suddenly, out of nowhere, I heard a proclamation: “I have so much more for you.” That was it—a seven-word declaration that appeared to drop from the sky. Somehow I knew it wasn’t one of my own thoughts that had bubbled up from my subconscious to the surface. Somehow I knew it was God.
I wrote those seven words into my journal the next morning, but it wasn’t until I read Paul’s declaration to the Philippians many months later that I understood their true meaning. God does indeed have so much more for us than we could ever possibly imagine, and what he has for us is not always what we think it will be or even what we think we want. Our vision is limited. We tend to hold on to the wrong things—wealth, ambition, acclaim, outcomes. But God? He’s holding on to only one thing. God is holding tightly to you and me, and no matter what, he won’t let go. The “so much more” God promised me wasn’t related to book sales or achievement or success. It was much better and much bigger than all that. The “so much more” was more of God himself—the deepest desire I didn’t even know I had.
We will not be made wholly and completely perfect, we will not be wholly and completely transformed, until Christ returns. Only then, when he reconciles heaven and earth, when the kingdom comes (see Rev. 21:1–5), will everything be set beautifully and perfectly right once and for all. God begins his good work in each one of us. He continues that good work with our participation each and every day of our lives here on earth. And he will finish that good work when he makes not only us but all things new.
“Trust in the slow work of God,” wrote Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. “Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you. And accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.”11 There is anxiety in incompleteness to be sure. But there is also peace in the relinquishing, in knowing that God continues his good work in us and through us, even when we can’t yet see what will be.
GOING DEEPER
In spiritual transformation, as in gardening, there are seasons of rapid growth and development, seasons of dormancy, and even seasons in which it looks like regression, rather than progression, is taking place. Do not despair; God is working in you and through you, even when you cannot discern his presence. Try, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin urged, “to accept the anxiety of feeling yourself . . . incomplete.”
Here are some questions to consider as you walk stutter-step toward wholeness: