Whew, hello.

Even though I’ve needed some serious recoup time since we’ve returned from the book tour (read more about my state of mind lately here), I’m excited to talk about all things summer here and on Artists for Joy Podcast.1 It has been one of the best summers in recent memory. We traveled thousands of miles as a family—and without a stroller, I might add— for the first time in eight years! That alone was a massive milestone, iykyk.

I got to see so many of you in real life, hold your sticky-note-clad copies of my books, sign them, and hug you. It was just magical. (Also, yes, I did wear the same shade of pink to almost all the events!)

Along the way, I ate crab cakes, ice cream, and one low-country boil (an awesome South Carolina dish with shrimp, potatoes, and fresh corn). I managed to maintain my strength training by visiting a grand total of 11 gyms across our six-week tour, using guest passes and tagging along with family. I felt strong, got plenty of sleep, swam in oceans, lakes, and pools, and we sold all but about ten of the handmade ceramic mugs we ordered for the launch!

Labor Day was earlier this week, marking the unofficial end of the season. But the equinox is still a few weeks away, so technically, I am right on time: it is still summer! (Stay with me!)

Before we dive into the list of what’s bringing me joy, I wanted to share that our Artists for Joy Patreon got a major glow-up! I spent a lot of time this summer brainstorming ways to support creatives in accessible, cost-effective ways. We now have three tiers and a bunch of new offerings, including a Wednesday morning co-working hour, Tuesday Voxer office hours for mini-coaching, group coaching calls, discounts on 1-on-1 sessions, free audio bundles, and more.

Tomorrow is our monthly meet-up, our CRAFT Goals workshop. You can join live or catch the recording here for a full tour of the new tiers.

Now, onto the list—a mix of the lighthearted, the slightly profound, and a big announcement about what’s next.

1. The Merit Minimalist Stick

Let’s get the surface-level stuff out of the way first. I don’t even like calling this makeup because it doesn’t feel like it. I got this recommendation from my friend Kendra Adachi (The Lazy Genius), and it truly lives up to the hype.

It’s a lightweight concealer/foundation stick that makes your skin look balanced and fresh without feeling cakey or heavy. I just dab a little around my eyes, nose, and any spots of redness, blend it with a brush, and it stays all day.

Pro Tip: If you buy it, go into Sephora and ask them to use their shade-matching technology. I would have picked the completely wrong shade on my own, but they found my exact match!

Link: Merit Minimalist Stick

2. Old Navy Snug Cropped Tank Top

Don’t judge me, but who actually knows how to wear clothes these days? High-rise mom jeans are great, but dealing with all that extra fabric to tuck in—or wearing cropped shirts that reveal your midriff every time you raise your arm—is exhausting.

Allow me to introduce: the perfect summer tank. It has a higher neckline, ribbed fabric, and hits at just the right length. It feels contained, flattering, and looks great under a blazer, with white pants, or tucked into a skirt. I bought it in over six colors and plan to use them as layering pieces throughout autumn and winter. They are currently on sale! Get them while you can!

Link: Old Navy Snug Cropped Tank Top

3. Professional Blowouts on the Road

Makeup and clothes might seem trivial, but feeling comfortable in your own skin… well, it matters. So instead of fighting the humidity and hot hair tools, I decided to set aside a little budget to get my hair blown out while on the road. It was a total game-changer.

With very long, thick hair, trying to style it takes forever—and, let’s be honest, it usually falls flat within an hour. Booking a quick blowout in the towns where I had speaking events meant I could sit back, let someone else care for me, and rely on dry shampoo to stretch out the style for almost a week. It was a small luxury that brought so much peace during a hectic travel schedule.

Before and after the best blowout of the summer… in Ohio!

4. The Acoustics at the Elbphilharmonie (Hamburg, Germany)

At the start of the summer, I took a detour to Hamburg with the Chamber Orchestra of New York—an ensemble I’ve played oboe and English horn with for 15 years. It was our very first European tour!

We performed at the “Elphi,” a concert hall built in 2017 that sits right on an island in the harbor of the Elbe River. The architecture alone is incredible: a glass wave structure perched atop a 1960s brick cocoa warehouse, complete with the world’s largest curved escalator.

Inside, the stage sits in the center with steep, terraced balcony seating rising all around it. No audience member is more than 100 feet from the conductor, apparently. And. the. acoustics. were. unbelievable. It was easily the finest hall I’ve ever had the privilege to play in.

During our dress rehearsal, I looked down at the wooden stage floor and noticed thousands of tiny indentations left by cellists’ endpins over the years. Looking at those little marks, it struck me that they looked just like constellations in a galaxy. It was a moment of pure micro- and macro-wonder.

Link: Learn more about the Elbphilharmonie

5. Eastern Tiger Swallowtail Butterflies

If you’ve seen the cover art for my new book, Art Is How God Loves Us, you might know that at the bottom of the original 18th-century painting by Jan Davidsz. de Heem, there is a small yellow butterfly, a Tiger Swallowtail Butterfly to be exact.

During the cover design process, the designers initially removed the butterfly to make my name easier to read. I hesitated to ask them to put it back—am I being a nuisance?? I worried—but when I asked my husband Edwin, he texted back five words that stuck with me: “New life, worth fighting for.” (You can read the full essay about that moment here.)

Wouldn’t you know, Eastern Tiger Swallowtails, the exact butterfly from the cover, followed me everywhere this summer. One circled us while we were walking in a park in Delaware; I saw them fluttering past on the interstate (THE INTERSTATE!!!); and when we got home to Michigan, they were suddenly floating through our yard daily.

Seeing that creation travel through centuries of art and land directly in front of me felt like a gentle reminder of God’s persistent, playful love.

6. Taking My Own Advice: Listening to the Work

As an artist and coach, I often talk about how tricky it can be when you start making a living from your creative work. It’s easy to let the audience, the critics, or your past successes subtly dictate what you make next. You start “painting landscapes” because you know landscapes sell, even if your soul is longing to try something new.

In Art Is How God Loves Us, I wrote that listening is the work.

This summer, after some deep soul rest, I realized that when I listened to what wanted to be created next, I needed more time and energy than I currently had. I knew that it was time for me to stop “painting landscapes” in the exact same way. I had new creative ideas bubbling up, but I didn’t have the bandwidth to spin every existing plate while adding something new.

So, I’m taking my own advice.

I’ve decided to put the Artists for Joy podcast on a seasonal sabbatical to give myself room to step through a new threshold. In its place, I am launching a brand-new show called Art’s Open Door—a space where we’ll name and notice beauty and explore what it means to live a slow, imperfect, human life.

The trailer for Art’s Open Door is live right now!

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

Listen here on Substack

For those of you who have been listening to Artists for Joy since 2020, and every download since, THANK YOU. I am keeping the door to Artists for Joy cracked open, and I’ll be sharing a full roadmap and more details about this transition in our season 6 finale, which will go live next Friday. So watch your favorite podcast feed for more details.

A reminder for anyone who needs to hear it:

What’s been bringing you joy this season, big or small? I’d love to hear in the comments!

I want to live in a world that values people and poems, not just machines.

In my newest book, Art Is How God Loves Us, I wrote about my favorite ancient Greek word, poiema, which describes a work of art crafted by hand. It’s where we get our word "poem." In the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, he writes that we are God’s handiwork, God’s poiema.

He could have chosen another Greek word to describe something made: techne—a tool, something useful. Techne is where we get our word technology. At the click of a button, we can generate a sonnet, predict the weather, or synthesize human knowledge into a single paragraph. But in our race toward efficiency, I often feel like we’re losing touch with what actually makes us human: our bodies, our vulnerabilities, our beautifully slow, imperfect lives.

What to Expect on the Show

What if this world could be one that values poems more than machines? A world that sees our humanity not as a glitch to overcome, but a work of art still being crafted by our Maker?

On the show you’ll get:

• Audio Essays: I’ll be sharing my own writing, reflections on beauty, and practical wisdom for the creative journey.

• Guest Conversations: Warm, honest interviews with artists, thinkers, and makers who are practicing what it means to live human-centered lives.

• Music & Poetry: Moments to pause, listen, and let your spirit be restored through the sacred beauty of created things.

Every Friday, we’ll explore how art and beauty are open doors to divine love, inviting us to choose incarnation over information.

Step Through the Door

I hope you’ll play the trailer above to take a breath and listen in. If you’re subscribed here, you’ll get each episode in your inbox. Art’s Open Door Podcast will also be available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, too. (It takes a beat for those to populate when a show is new, so hang tight if they’re not there right away. I’ll update those links when I have them!)

For now, press play above and let me know what you think.

To my longtime readers, thank you for making this such a rich and encouraging place to land as I create this new container for conversation and community.

Do you know someone in your life who would enjoy this kinda thing? I’d be honored if you’d tag or share the subscription link with them.

As we start this new chapter, I’d love to hear from you:

Where in your life are you feeling called to choose the slow, human beauty of a “poem” over the speed of a “machine”?

There are lots of fun updates coming this fall for all things Artists for Joy—podcast news, interviews with inspiring creators, new tiers on Patreon, etc.! All that excitement is coming, and I will share more next week, but in the meantime, it felt important to catch you up on how things have been around here (by “here” I mean inside my head and heart.)

Since the book tour for Art Is How God Loves Us ended, I’ve been reflecting on what long periods of extended output can do to the artist— a.k.a how I’m really doing at the end of a very busy, full summer— a.k.a. how I’m learning and relearning a deep truth about the creative process.

Since it’s such a personal one, it’s for paid subscribers only. (If you’re considering upgrading, now’s a good time with all the new perks coming next week, just sayin’!)

Read more

Welcome, friends! If you are new here, my name is Merideth, and I am an oboist, author, and creative coach. Art’s Open Door is all about exploring how creativity, beauty, and the spiritual life intersect. We are right on the cusp of a big milestone: the official pub date of my newest book, Art is How God Loves Us, is a little over one week away—on July 7!

The book is a deeply personal exploration of the ways music, poetry, visual art, and more serve as an open door, inviting us into a conversation with something much larger than ourselves.

Today, I’ve got a short piece I wrote on a recent transatlantic flight that considers the book’s cover art itself as a spiritual gateway—a lens through which we can hold both deep joy and quiet grief.

I wonder now if she noticed my light come on every morning at 5:07. First, the soft glow above the kitchen sink while I silently made my coffee, then the single lamp to the right of the living room couch where I sat down to write. She was awake too. I knew this because, like clockwork, her brake lights would flash in the dark across the street, backing out of her driveway at exactly 6:18 AM. Every single weekday morning.

My mother used to warn me against being a “Looky Loo”—her term for a nosy shadow peeking through the blinds. I never meant to be one. Mostly because I value privacy— I like to keep to myself, especially at home.

One of the things that surprised me most about moving from the city to the suburbs is that, even with fewer people around, it feels even less anonymous. How was it that in a city of millions, it could feel easier to go unnoticed? There were Looky Loos there, too, to be sure. And yet, something about so many people doing so many things made you feel a little more incognito. In the ‘burbs, the stage is smaller, the lighting a little harsher. You couldn’t pull out of your driveway or walk the trash bins to the street without feeling the eyes of your neighbors.

I didn’t start watching this particular neighbor on purpose. First of all, her house wasn’t even immediately adjacent to mine; she lived alone (as far as I knew), across the street and down a few houses. Hers was a simple brick ranch, like the rest of us in this Metro Detroit neighborhood built during the 1950s Motor City boom; all the houses on our street have more or less the same layouts. (We have all the same problems, too, since we see the same plumbers’ trucks off and on in others’ driveways!) I fell in love with this neighbor’s house because of the oak tree in the front. Each fall, it turns such a bright fluorescent orange that no iPhone can capture it.

One day last fall, my son, then 4 years old, spoke to her. We were walking to the bus stop to pick up his sister one afternoon, and the neighbor was in her yard, healthy and rosy-cheeked, filling her sixth bag of crispy, dried leaves in time for the compost truck to come in the morning. Eli, who isn’t usually overly chatty with strangers, called out as we walked by, “Wow, you’re doing a great job with those leaves.” She smiled and thanked him.

You might be asking at this point, why I didn’t take that moment to ask my neighbor’s name. I cannot honestly say why. Maybe I felt awkward about the fact that we’d lived there for almost five years and had never introduced ourselves? Have I mentioned that small talk is not my strong suit?

When we left the city, we’d dreamt of having an idyllic suburban life where kids played kick-the-can, and neighbors came over unannounced to borrow eggs. But in truth, our neighborhood is not exactly that kind of neighborhood. When we moved in, no one came with cookies or pies or introductions. We do know those that live in the three houses immediately next door and across from us: the single woman in her 50’s who always has special candy and toys for Eva and Eli on Halloween, an elderly couple living with their one adult son who lent us their extra trash bin once, a retired couple whose grandkids you can hear laughing in the pool from behind their privacy shrubs—we sometimes get their mail or Christmas card, but as much as we’d like it to be otherwise, we are not close with our neighbors at all. They aren’t rude per se, a little cold maybe, standoffish, politely waving from the mailbox (an occasional complaint about the length of our grass, but that’s another story for another time).

Mostly, the people in our neighborhood seem to want to be left alone. And so, we do our best to keep to ourselves, too. On that day last fall, after my son’s sweet compliment, I kept walking. I noticed her habits from the window on occasion. Not in a Looky-Loo way, just an observant person without blinds on that end of the house who wakes up early.

After I finished my manuscript, I let myself sleep in for a while. I didn’t notice when she stopped going to work. It must have been later, in the spring, when we walked the bus, that I saw her pull out at 8:20; this time, her short blond bob was gone. Her now bald head was covered by a scarf. She smiled with weak eyes and waved; we were bundled in winter gear, the oak tree bare.

When the green returned, I watched her lawn get long. One day at twilight, a younger man (her son?) arrived to mow the grass.

The seeming decline of the neighbor with my favorite oak tree happened slowly and then all at once. One Thursday, as I washed dishes, I saw the estate sale signs go up. That weekend, dozens of cars lined the streets as people carried her belongings out into the spring sunlight. I saw her Christmas decorations get thrown into a stranger’s Subaru, a mirror slide unceremoniously into the back of a van. My husband asked me if I wanted to go see what they had at the sale, but I couldn’t do it. “We didn’t even know her name. It feels wrong,” I told him. The artwork, a pair of big red ceramic pots, boxes of what looked like miscellaneous exercise equipment. If we’d had blinds, I would have closed them.

My heart broke when, a few days later, I saw the moving truck, then a donation van for what no one wanted, and finally, a dumpster. Every week after that, it felt like someone new was there—a contractor, a painter, a realtor. Then came the open houses.

I realized I was watching someone’s life dismantle, piece by piece, like the petals falling from a wilting flower.

On the final walk to the bus stop as the school year ended, her house seemed abandoned, empty. I grieved for a house I had never set foot in, someone’s name I never knew.

The book I wrote last winter, when she was still leaving for work at 6:18—I can hold it in my hands now. The oak tree is green; it’ll be orange again in a few months. She won’t be here to see it.

The first few cover images that the publishers suggested were nice, but when I saw the one featuring “Vase with Flowers” by Dutch master Jan Davidsz. de Heem, I gasped. It’s striking—one of the impossible bouquets of the 17th century—when artists painted floral arrangements that could never have existed in real life. Not all those flowers bloom at the same time. It is an artificial wholeness, an aspirational season of abundance that does not exist.

In a way, I had been doing the exact same thing on my couch all winter: weaving together words of new life while a quiet winter of decline withered outside my window.

The dark background makes the colors glimmer, and when you look closely, you’ll see the reflection in the vase—a windowsill. I liked to imagine the painter himself standing at it, watching his neighbors, too.

The book I wrote, while (I think) my neighbor was dying, is full of examples of art that has been a spiritual gateway for me. Works of music, architecture, and poetry that I felt God had used to teach me something, to invite me into a conversation with something larger than myself. And so, it feels right, here as it is finally time to share the book with the world, that the cover itself becomes a spiritual gateway, helping me name something important about life and art and loving and grieving.

When you look closer at the bouquet, you’ll see that some of the fruit is rotting, and some petals are turning yellow. There are bugs and creepy critters. I read that in the Dutch Golden Age—an era of immense material wealth and worldly success—these paintings served a dual purpose. They were a celebration of abundance, yes, but they were also visual sermons. I’m told that the artists of the time included the glory of impossible creation alongside its inevitable decay to make a bigger spiritual statement—something called a vanitas painting, rooted in the ancient tradition of memento mori, Latin for “remember you must die.” Painters like de Heem included a snail on a stem, a caterpillar on a leaf, or a moldy spot on a peach as a gentle, persistent spiritual check. They were reminding the viewer that youth fades, riches spoil, and time catches up to us all. (They were Calvinists, after all!)

In one of my favorite novels, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, right before the mother dies, she teaches her son about these moments in Dutch art—she says, “When painters put a bit of mold or darkness into a painting, they’re telling you a secret—it won’t last.”1

Art allows us to hold the beauty and the grief together; the impossibility of one makes the other more poignant, more real.

There is no such thing as a “still life.” As soon as it blooms, it is already dying.

What else, besides art, can allow us to hold life and death together?

What else names them both as beautiful in their time, celebrating the fleeting nature of being alive, whispering the secret—nothing lasts.

At one point in the cover design process, they removed a small butterfly from the bottom of the painting to make the letters of my name more legible. I agreed that the butterfly needed to be moved, but I was sad to see that when the final edits came, the bug was gone. I remember texting my husband Edwin, asking if a small butterfly was worth fighting for, and without hesitation, he texted back, “New life. Worth fighting for.”

What is the book cover teaching me? If that painting on the cover, painted hundreds of years ago, was an open door, where does it lead me now?

It asks me to hold death and life together.

It invites me to tell you that I think my neighbor died.

To admit with grief and shame that I never knew her name.

It offers a reminder that living and dying are a process. That life is holding both, believing in new life, choosing to fight for it in the face of despair and decay.

They put the butterfly back, just above my name. Every time I look at it, I will think of my neighbor, of all the ways life is not still, that created things, even with their inherent decay, hold a sacred beauty we cannot understand.

This summer, I’m on the road for a multi-state book tour through New York, South Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and beyond. It is a strange thing to live out of a bag, moving from city to city, talking to rooms full of beautiful strangers about how art is a spiritual gateway, while carrying the quiet memories of a brick ranch across the street, a beautiful tree, and all of life’s fleeting transitions. But as I look out at the faces in each new city, I am reminded that the people in these rooms carry the exact same weight—each of them navigating their own impossible bouquets of abundance and grief.

Travel, like a Dutch vanitas painting, reminds you of how temporary everything is—the quick flash of a hotel room window, the brief warmth of a new conversation, the inevitable packing up to move on to the next town.

There’s a new family moving into the favorite oak tree house. When we get home from the tour, I plan to bring them a loaf of sourdough and introduce myself. They have a young daughter. Maybe she’ll invite Eli over to jump in the leaves this fall. If they don’t, we may just be bold enough to invite ourselves into their yard, ready to catch the orange before it falls.

Thanks for reading. If you want to dive deeper into these types of conversations, Art Is How God Loves Us is officially available for pre-order now, ahead of its July 7 release. Pre-ordering is one of the most powerful ways you can support an author, and it helps ensure this message reaches the people who need it most. Grab your copy at these affiliate links here.

I’d love to hear what resonated for you in the comments below. They’re open to everyone!

The other day, I stepped from my garage into the shining Michigan morning and headed down the driveway for my daily walk. The peonies will pop any day, the birds in my neighborhood are exuberant (edging on deranged, if I’m honest), and the Zyrtec is fighting the good fight against the cottonwood. This daily 2ish-mile loop around the neighborhood is saving my life right now. Spring arrived like that one aunt to the family reunion—late and a little disheveled, but full of wonder and wildness.

As I got to the edge of our yard, I took the first sip of the oatmilk latte I had made myself (at that point) almost two hours ago.1

It tasted sweeter than usual.

Hmm. Have I been drinking so much coffee that I can’t even taste the bitterness anymore?

I took off the lid and looked inside.

Somehow in the chaotic morning, I’d managed to steam the milk and make the espresso, but I’d failed to walk back to the coffee maker and pour the espresso into said milk. I pursed my lips and sighed, turned back up towards the house to try again.

I could tell you at least three other things I have done like that this week. Kid in the wrong clothes, keys nowhere to be found, face-palming here and running defense there, and I’ve come to expect it at times like this, honestly. It is Maycember after all—that moment when all the graduations, concerts, and parties are happening at once. It’s as busy as December… just with better weather.

I didn’t just forget my espresso because it’s Maycember, though.

I realized, once up the hill, slowly wandering along my favorite unpaved road in Michigan, that, sure, there is a lot going on literally, but there is also a lot going on within me.

There’s the too-full calendar, and then there’s the anxiety filling my thoughts to the brim.

There’s launching a book, and there’s all the feelings that come with that.

There’s the making of the thing, and there’s the sharing of the thing and all the vulnerability and turbulent mental gymnastics that follow.

In Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, she talks a lot about the mental game of making, specifically fear’s role in the process.

She argues that fear and creativity are two sides of an artist’s coin. Creativity invites us into the unknown, and the mere presence of uncertainty prompts our brains to trigger fear as a protective response. Reading her book many years ago was the first time I realized that fear was good because it meant that creativity was close at hand. And more importantly, if we try to eliminate fear, we’ll end up feeling blocked in another way.

Instead of fighting it, Gilbert suggests treating fear like a passenger on a road trip. She invites the reader to write a letter to Fear—to establish some ground rules before you start a new creative project.

I wasn’t at the beginning of this current creative project, to be sure. In fact, I was nearing a kind of end. I mulled over all of this as I walked my well-worn path.

Reflecting on the journey, from 2024 when I submitted the proposal for this current book, to now, more than two years later, sharing it with the world, I see fear has been with me on this expedition since the beginning of the course. I’ve said it many times before: I much prefer writing books to launching them. (I bet most writers do!) It felt important to name that, yes, it is absolutely expected that a whole new batch of fears would show up at this last leg of our creative and literal road trip.

I let myself imagine stepping off the gravel road of daily routine and into the treacherous, unstable, marshmallow-y landscape of my fears. If life were a video game, the “fear level” would be a fake-cheerful gelatinous minefield, a fun-house mirror candy-land, but with worst-case scenarios and shame spirals wherever you step.

No one cares.

No one shows up.

It’s a flop, and I don’t get to write books anymore.

As much as I found it difficult to be in fear land, to find my feet sticky with the pessimism of these thoughts, I realized that the anxious part of my mind—the little hamster on the wheel of achievement and striving—stopped running for a second as the fears were named.

I rounded the last corner toward home, and I realized that fear was actually the hamster’s fuel. No wonder she was tired. No wonder she forgot the coffee.

I wrote about courage in my first book, The Artist’s Joy, similar to Gilbert’s line of thinking— fear is the invitation to courage, the momentum we use to find motion towards our wildest dreams. People often mention the chapter to me.

I use the image of a ballerina inside the 32 spins Odile in Swan Lake. You can’t think much beyond the spin that you are in. Connecting each one to your deepest “why,” doing the work of showing up even when you’re scared, and then trusting the momentum of the whirl (the three W’s of courage! )

Moving from fear into courage means choosing bravery, following the sense of motion behind it, which you wouldn’t otherwise get from the sidelines. Fear is a manifestation of courage, a sign that you care, a sign to move forward and start spinning. We spin from fear to courage into deeper purpose. We can find there a rooted and impervious joy. Even if specific goals aren’t reached when we exit the spin (even if, as Odile, we can’t get all 32 spins every night), we get something even better: we arrive at the end of that effort a whole new person—fear’s dance partner.

When I got back from my walk, I decided to listen to Elizabeth Gilbert (and myself, haha) and start working with the fear instead of avoiding it.

My fear and I have been dance partners for a long time, maybe all my life. I could’ve written her a letter, but a list felt more right. I realized she had a lot of information for me. After each one, a truth poured out (if the fear was based on a lie), and I added an action to take, too.2

So here it is: my not-so-short list of fears turned truths turned actions—the exact framework that is helping me move through them.

Fear to Focus

• Fear: No one will care.

  • Truth: Some people won’t care, and that’s ok.

  • Action: Serve the people who do care.

• Fear: I’ll run out of energy at the 11th hour.

  • Truth: You know the things that help you conserve your energy. This is not a sprint; it is a marathon.

  • Action: walk every day, eat clean, manage coffee and alcohol intake, go to sleep by 10:30, take your B-12 injections every two weeks, talk to friends, close the computer, put down your phone.

• Fear: The book sales aren’t going to be good enough.

  • Truth: What does “good enough” even mean? If you are honest, the ideal sales numbers are…well… infinity. That’s not reasonable or helpful. We aren’t in this for the sales anyway, as nice as specific numbers would be; we are in this for the impact, the message that God loves us through art. Each sale is a beloved human person who is open to receiving that message.

  • Action: Be grateful for every single one who holds the book in their hands. Create for that ONE. Then any sales beyond one are a bonus. Look, you’re already winning!

• Fear: I won’t get to write another one.

  • Truth: The success of one creation does not get to have that kind of power over you. You can write as many books as you want. If the current partners don’t see your next project as a good fit, you’ll find more partners, or you’ll do it yourself. The motivation to write books can’t come from the unsustainable striving impulse; it must come from joy.

  • Action: Cultivate joy for your inner artist. Keep writing things that aren’t marketing posts (for goodness' sake). Feed the creative well of inspiration by reading great books, surrounding yourself with art you love, and doing the work of improving your craft from a place of curiosity and love.

• Fear: Someone will think it’s derivative and lame.

  • Truth: Someone probably already thinks that, and look at you— you are still standing.

  • Action: Tough skin, tender heart.3

• Fear: Someone will feel left out.

  • Truth: Again, you can’t control other people’s feelings. You spoke the truth as you saw it. It won’t be for everyone. You did your best.

  • Action: Tough skin, tender heart.

• Fear: Someone will think it’s heretical.

  • See above.

• Fear: No one will come to the book launch events.

  • Truth: Your friends and family will be there. They are so much more than no one. Authors you admire sometimes have single-digit numbers at book launch events; it just means the marketing could have been better. It doesn’t mean anything about you or your book.

  • Action: send personal invites and keep at the marketing game. (It’s a game, remember!)

• Fear: I won’t play well at book events and surrounding gigs because I’m too busy with book stuff.

  • Truth: You have trained all your life for this. You know how to put in the time and effort to get yourself in shape. You can do that with your eyes closed. There’s still time to just do it.

  • Action: Prioritize the fundamentals practice every single day between now and each event.

• Fear: I won’t speak well at book events because I’m too busy making reeds or handling logistics.

  • Truth: What do you need to feel prepared? There’s still time. And honestly, the best book events are the ones where authors just act like themselves. Show up and be authentically you.

  • Action: Do the things you know you need to do to get ready to show up how you want. Take some quiet time before going on to name that, create outlines of remarks or workshop prompts, visualize them the day before.

• Fear: My husband and kids will feel like they're in second and third place to my work.

  • Truth: Love doesn’t keep score in minutes; it registers presence. This launch is a season, not a lifetime; I am inviting them into the adventure rather than hiding it from them. Besides, showing my children what it looks like to courageously bring a dream into the world is one of the greatest gifts I can give them.

  • Action: Protect the margins. When we’re together, put the phone in another room and close the laptop. Brainstorm with the kids what would make this summer great, create a bucket list of simple things each person wants to try, and map out dedicated family-only days on the calendar before the tour even starts.

• Fear: I won’t feel confident in my body.

  • Truth: My body is the instrument that allows me to do this work. It doesn’t need to look perfect to be powerful; it just needs to be nourished and supported. Confidence doesn’t come from a mirror; it comes from feeling grounded, strong, and cared for from the inside out.

  • Action: Treat my body like the elite athlete it is. Prioritize daily strength and Pilates movement, hit my macro and protein goals to sustain my energy, maintain a hard 10:30 PM bedtime, and remember to breathe deeply before stepping onto any stage.

• Fear: I won’t make enough social media content, so everyone forgets I exist.

  • Truth: No one cares that much about how much you post or forgets you that easily. Most friends online want to support you. You aren’t letting anyone down by not posting. Do what you can each day.

  • Action: make a reel or post something simple every day until July 7.

• Fear: The kids will associate my books with their summers being unfun and hectic road trips to nowhere .

  • Truth: Edwin and I are co-captains of this road trip, and we get to set the vibe. What if a book tour can be an epic family adventure? I know the kids will remember the weird roadside diners, the hotel pool swimming at 9:00 PM, and the music blaring with the windows down. We can make this a core memory of fun and freedom instead of a work trip.

  • Action: Be intentional about packing, planning, and having fun! The goal is to be truly present to and with them on this adventure. (Need to name some more action items here! If you have road trip tips or ideas, please share in the comments!)

I sat with the list for a few days. I started taking action, and this week I’ve felt a quiet shift inside my chest. The hamster wheel hasn’t stopped exactly, but the cage doors have cracked open again.

For weeks, I’ve been trying to outrun the possibility of failure, only to realize again that my fear was not the enemy—it was information. The fears are the intense, messy proof of how deeply I care about this book, these people, and this life I’ve built.

When I walked back into the kitchen, I found the forgotten mug of espresso on the counter right where I left it. It was a little cold by now, but as I took a sip, it still tasted good: rich, deep, slightly bitter— completely awake.

The peonies will pop any day.

The road trip book tour countdown is on.

And whether I nail all thirty-two spins or stumble on the first one, I know I am already moving.

Fear is in the passenger seat, but it’s my hands on the wheel.

Thanks for reading, friends. Tell me what action your fears invite you to in the comments!

Links:

Art Is How God Loves Us arrives on July 7!

Pre-Order Your Copy Today to claim your exclusive pre-order bonuses and ensure you’re the first to read it.

Check Out the Summer Book Tour Schedule to see when I’ll be speaking, playing, and celebrating in a city near you!

In less than two months, Art Is How God Loves Us will be in your hands!

In celebration of narrating the audiobook this week,1 I’m sharing a poem from the intro to Part One.

As you’ll see from the ending inscription, it was inspired by David Whyte’s poem, “Self Portrait.”2 The first time I heard his poem, my husband was reading it aloud as a gathering prayer at the church he was planting when we first got married. Something about the poem imprinted on my heart.

He goes onto explore the weight of existence—the “harsh need” the world has to change us and the “bitter unwanted passion” of our own limitations. I was struck by how Whyte doesn’t care about theological arguments or religious labels. Instead, he asks if you are willing to “melt into that fierce heat of living.”

As a musician and a writer, I spend so much of my life trying to be perfect, or at least “good enough.” Sometimes I feel like I come up against the “bitter, unwanted passion” of my own limitations, well… daily. That’s what being an artist is all about, in some ways.

Whyte’s poem gave me a different goal than goodness: he urged me instead to be prepared.

Prepared to stand with “firm eyes” in the face of a world with its “harsh need to change” me, prepared to “melt into that fierce heat of living, falling toward the center of [my] longing.”

The poem taught me that our most honest “self-portrait” isn’t a polished image; it’s the place where we finally stop running and say who we are.

“Spark,” was written as a response to that invitation. If Whyte is asking if we are willing to stand in the fire of living, “Spark” is naming what that fire actually is.

I wanted to explore the idea that the despair or the longing Whyte mentions isn’t just human emotion—it’s a signal. When you find yourself weeping before a painting or feeling less alone because of a certain piece of music, you are catching a glimpse of the Artist God.

“Spark” is about the inextinguishable pilot light that burns even when we feel defeated, even when we fear we do not belong. It’s a reminder that our tenderness isn’t a weakness; it’s that “fierce surrender” to the fact that we are constantly being found by a Goodness that is older and larger than we.

Spark

It doesn’t interest me if you believe
in the God of my understanding or yours.
I want to know if you’ve stood weeping
before a painting,
if you’ve found the world of a novel more palatable
than this one.
I want to know if you’ve woken in the night
to the answer,
if rush of word or image or interval
doused the flames of overthinking
while you washed the dishes.

The Greeks said, “Eureka!”
(I have found it)
but I want to know if One has found you,
if the music makes you feel less alone.
I want to know if you’ve sensed
some overwhelming goodness
behind the color of the sky
or in the way baby hair wisps upward
along the back of her neck.
Have you ever wondered if your tenderness
makes you weak
or if it’s this fierce surrender to Love
that makes us strong?

In every creation
there glows a glint in recognition of an Artist God.
The studio door slightly cracked,
a remnant, a spark of
Let There Be Light,
an inextinguishable pilot burns, still flickering.
I have been told, in that beauty, art sings a refrain
every heart knows.

—After David Whyte’s poem “Self-Portrait”

What the booth taught me

I’ll have a longer list at some point soon, but one thing I learned listening to myself read the entire 60K-word book in just two sittings: I especially loved voicing the poems and the short interludes.

In the silence of that room, the words stopped being just ink on a page and became breath, the smoke of incense, a proof of life. It reminded me that art is a living thing meant to be shared, and that when we create, we are participating in a much bigger conversation.

As I sat there (for 11 hours), something shifted. I realized it wasn’t really about my voice at all. It was about the Giver of Breath. If my words felt like “proof of life,” it’s because they are echoes of the One who spoke the first Word. When we create, we aren’t just sending out a message from and amongst ourselves; we are becoming a conduit for a message of Love that started at the beginning of time.

I can’t wait for you to hear this book in that same spirit—not as my own words, but as a small, flickering evidence of the Artist God who is always finding us, always speaking, and always loving us through the things we make.

How to Preorder✨

I am so excited for you to read (and hear!) the rest of the stories and reflections in Art Is How God Loves Us. This book is a deep dive into the sacred beauty of created things and how that beauty speaks of God.

Preordering helps bookstores know to keep it on the shelves and ensures that these messages of hope and creativity reach the people who need them most.

You can preorder your copy from these affiliate links:

• Bookshop (support local if you can!)

• Amazon

• Barnes and Noble

• If you’re a church or professional organization, you can order in bulk directly from the publisher and get a discount

The audiobook preorder link will be up soon and I will share it as soon as I have it!

Thank you for being part of this community and for helping me keep the spark alive.

I’d love to hear from you:

Is there a specific painting, a piece of music, or a line of poetry that has “made you feel less alone” or found you when you needed it most?

Please share it in the comments—I’d love to know what beauty is sustaining you right now.

When she walked off stage after performing in her school talent show, I knew from the way she was hugging me that ice cream was in order. That is how, earlier today, I found myself leaving my daughter’s school and heading towards Cold Stone Creamery at 7:30 PM on a school night.

Eva has been playing the cello since she was 3.5 years old. I almost typed “we’ve” been playing the cello, because, any Suzuki parent knows, it’s a team sport. In this specific method of teaching music to very young children, there is one designated adult who serves as the practice partner and learns alongside the child. I did rent a full-size cello for a few months, but now, 5 years into this musical adventure, I am mostly a silent partner.

There was a moment about a year ago when she stopped wanting my Juilliard-trained, helicopter mom helping style—I wonder why?! (Sarcasm.) I can “hear” her rolling her eight-year-old eyes right now.

These days, when she practices, I try to “disappear,” staying close enough that she could easily ask for my help, but not so close that she feels my presence judging her.

Is this what growing up feels like?

I think I could write a whole book on what I have learned from this journey she’s been on with the cello. It’s taught me so much about myself and my creative practice; it has softened some scar tissue, helped me get reacquainted with a childlike part of myself that I get to visit only as I watch her learn. It’s incredible. She’s incredible. I’m so grateful.

Today, though, we learned a new lesson.

As the stickiness of sprinkles and sweet cream fell onto their booster seats, I knew I wanted to get the words down for me, and maybe for you.

Her performance at the talent show didn’t go as planned. Things went wrong. Most of it was neither her fault nor within her control. I won’t share the unique details here; that is her story to blog about one day. You’ve heard the old adage, “You win some, you lose some”? Well, today we lost some.

On the way to get ice cream, I told her about some of my losses.

• That time at my senior recital in high school when my reed cracked in the middle of the first piece, and no sound was coming out of the instrument.

• That time, I got so much water in my back-octave key while playing a concerto that all of the top-octave notes came out lower, and there was no time or way to fix it.

• The very specific and hurtful words that people have said about my playing and my writing over the years

• The many auditions I did not win

• When the thread on an English horn reed came untied during a concert, the sound just kind of slowly slipped away. (Many of my “losses” involve reeds, I’m an oboe player, after all!)

There are dozens more humiliating moments that make my face hot to this very day. My husband was traveling and couldn’t make it tonight, but I even dug up some of his top embarrassing moments to the delight of the gigglers in the back seat.

As I let their laughter wash over me, I realized I had Eva’s attention. And just for a moment, I got to be someone she trusted to speak truth to her—not about her intonation or bow hold— but about what matters most. Not slinking silently nearby in the kitchen, but locking eyes in the rear-view mirror.

No one told me how special these moments would become as they age, when you’re standing at a vulnerable juncture with a young person who still somehow trusts you more than anyone on the planet. Holy ground.

So, I said a prayer silently, Oh, please don’t let me mess this one up, and started to give a pep talk to someone I love very much. A pep talk to myself, too, and to you, if/when you need it.

Because we do lose some. That is, if we are being brave.

And I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather be up there and risk embarrassing myself than in the audience longing for enough courage to take the stage.

Not giving up, keeping going, finishing anyway— these things are more valuable and more attainable than perfection ever could be.

If you’re lucky (which you are!), this performance, project, or creative endeavor will be one of many. There will be good, there will be bad, there will be everything in between. What matters more than the quality of any one performance is who you are becoming. Let the ones you lose make you more resilient, compassionate, tender-hearted, and tough-skinned.

Nothing you do or say or play or make has anything to do with your belovedness. Whether you win or lose does not change what the people who matter most think or feel about you.

We talk so much about the “wins” that we miss the value of the losses. We treat losing like a void—a lack of accolade or applause, an empty pit of embarrassment and shame. But after watching Eva navigate the silence of a talent show gone sideways, I realized that “losing some” isn’t absence or lack, it’s actually a kind of gain.

You may lose the pipe-dream of perfection, but you gain grit.

Perfectionism is as brittle and as thin as glass; it shatters the moment things go wrong. But when you lose your footing on stage and keep playing anyway, you trade that fragile ego for something much stronger (and more useful, frankly): resilience. The world didn’t end when the reed cracked or the key stuck. You’re still standing.

You may lose the audience, but you gain your people.

The wins bring the approval of faceless and fickle people who will come and go, but the losses bring loved ones with ice cream. We don’t need a standing ovation to prove our worth; we need those who will hold the cello while we cry.

You lose the “what if,” but you gain the “even so.”

The person who doesn’t try is haunted by “What if…?” And, even in losing, you get to be emboldened and say, “Even so, I showed up.” There is a specific, holy kind of peace that comes from being exhausted and unsuccessful, and knowing in your bones that you didn’t hide. Losing means you are doing the thing. And being upset when things don’t go well just means that you care. Caring is way more fulfilling than apathy; loving and losing is better than never loving at all. (These sayings are cliches for a reason: they are true!)

So, if you’re sitting in your own version of a metaphorical Cold Stone Creamery tonight, nursing a loss that makes your face hot: Congratulations.

You are doing the brave work of being a human who tries. Don’t rush to push the memory away or fix it so it never happens again. Instead, look at the “some” you lost and see all that you’re becoming through that experience.

Maybe“winning some” helps us pay the bills or feed the ego. But “losing some” is where the soul grows. And if I have to choose which one I want my daughter—or myself—to be rich in? I want to take the soul growth.

When we got home, after a bath and a book, when her brother was asleep, Eva reemerged from her bedroom. She wanted another hug, and of course, I obliged. When she pulled away, she asked me if she could practice cello a little. I tried to be neutral. I didn’t want to over-eagerly “mom” the moment and scare it away. I simply nodded and said, “Sure.”

I sat on the couch in the other room, held my breath, and listened.

She didn’t play the piece from the talent show. She played the next song in the Suzuki book, the one she’d been working on in her lesson. There was no stage, no judge, no audience. Just a girl and a box with strings in the quiet of a Thursday night.

In that moment, I realized that the “some” she had lost at the talent show—the pride, the perfection, the external validation—had been replaced by something far more indestructible. She wasn’t playing to be good; she was playing because the music was hers.

That is the hope I want to leave you with.

The losses don’t leave us empty.

Whether you are eight or eighty, what if the “lose some” moments are actually invitations to come home to yourself? To find yourself loved, regardless of your performance?

I need this pep talk as much as Eva does. With my new book launching in July, I am standing in the wings, feeling that familiar heat in my face. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to “win some.”

But then I hear the cello in the other room.

I remember that I didn’t write it to be perfect; I wrote it to be brave. I wrote it because I have something to say. Even if my reed cracks or my voice shakes, I wrote it because I believe creating is worth doing, win or lose.

So, if you’re hurting today because things didn’t go as planned, take heart. Losing is just part of the process. It means you are inside a brave, creative life. Let’s practice seeing losses as a tool to strip away the noise until all that’s left is a deeper, more honest core.

When you are ready, after the ice cream pit stop, go ahead. Pick up your bow. Start again. Not because you have something to prove, but because when you see the losses as gains, you realize there’s nothing to fear.

Thanks for reading, friends. A reminder that today is the final day to join the launch team for Art Is How God Loves Us. I’d love to read the new book together in June. Register and learn more here.

What are some of your most embarrassing “losses”?

Tell me in the comments, and I’ll share them with Eva! 🫣

Here it is, for your enjoyment:

I don’t know why, but that unsuspecting raccoon and his little hands just get me. The longer version is here if you want to giggle even more. You’re welcome. Of the 2.4 million views that video got on IG, my kids and I account for at least 2K.

Confession: Lately, I’m feeling a lot like the neighborhood raccoon, caught red-handed on her way somewhere she should not be going.

In the judgmental light of these days, less than three months until my new book comes out, I find myself (yet again) stuck in a familiar cycle— something I’ve been working for more than a decade to leave behind once and for all. It isn’t digging in the garbage. For me, it’s the striving. The non-stop, try-hard energy. The insatiable desire to achieve. To keep things moving up and to the right, at all costs.

For me, this looks like:

• frantic/near-constant email checking

• mood swings based on the latest news or metrics— preorder numbers, reviews, social media clicks, etc.

• fatigue— ignored and chased by just one more pitch email, tour stop follow-up, research rabbit hole, until it is suddenly 11:30 PM and I have yet to eat dinner.

• avoiding things I know that help— like drinking water instead of coffee, walking, listening to music or a novel instead of a non-fiction book or podcast.

When I am staring at spreadsheets more than I am writing new words or even morning pages: Stop right there. PUT YOUR HANDS UP. We’ve got ourselves a problem.

If we don’t laugh, we’ll cry, right?

If you’ve read my first book, The Artist’s Joy, you know how long I’ve been attempting to reprogram this part of myself.

As an Ivy-leaguer, a Juilliard grad, an Enneagram 4 who spent most of her life leaning hard into her 3 wing, I am prone to confusing my creative practice with achievement, with PRODUCTivity—it is hidden in plain sight, for goodness sakes—and in my experience, creating from a place of striving always leads to exhaustion, eventual apathy, and complete and total burnout.

When I get to a certain point in the creative process, when the ideation phase is over, when the proverbial rubber starts hitting the proverbial road, I reach for perfectionism and accolades as desperately as a raccoon reaches for garbage. If I had to psychologically analyze myself, it’s the fear and anxiety, the shame, that slips my wheels back into those old familiar ruts. When I feel most vulnerable, I reach for control. I overfunction. I don’t rest. I skip all the things that make me feel like my best self—grounded, centered, free from the outcome— in pursuit of some “atta girl” that will make me feel “good enough.”

You too?

I hope it makes you feel a little less alone to know that even someone who quite literally lives and breathes creative recovery, who preaches artists dates and self-care and process over product and maker verses manager and devotion over discipline— struggles, too. That even after all the work I have done to find a joyful, sustainable practice, it can be hard to stay the course. Lately, I’m finding the higher the stakes, the more tempting those old patterns become. Martha Beck calls it a “change back attack.” I call it: “the devil I know.”

My former writing coach (now friend!) Ann Kroeker told me once that when you create something with a message, for better or for worse, you get a chance (often over and over again) to live into that message yourself, to put your theories to the test.

Try this exercise: go back to the song you wrote about freedom, the poem with the deep truth about love, the novel with the powerful moral, and look at the ways your life lately is inviting you deep into that art’s meaning again.

I know it is true for me. I’ve written about how the tools in The Artist’s Joy helped me get through launching and sharing The Artist’s Joy. I remember a visceral moment in the throes of that book tour when I again felt majorly disregulated and stressed. I found myself in front of my computer, leading a cohort around self-forgiveness at the Exact. Perfect. Moment. I’ve heard many writers say about their own books, “I wrote the book that I needed.” And I would add to that truth, “God wrote the book I needed and my hands happened to have typed it.”

This week, if I am honest, I’ve been more focused on pitching the book than practicing its message. That’s hard to admit.

As I reflected on my wayward, raccoon, striver heart—reaching for the “garbage” of metrics instead of the actual gift of creating—I realized I was trying to outrun the very grace I’ve been called to share. In centering prayer, as I watched my thoughts loudly ping pong against the recesses of my consciousness, it finally hit me: Art is how God loves us.

Not our productivity, and certainly not our success. God’s creative power is God’s love. When we create or simply delight in beauty, we encounter the same love that spoke the world into being—a love that can stop even the most frantic raccoon heart from seeking validation elsewhere.

And all at once, grace feels like that friend who loves you enough to say the hard thing out loud, speaking truth over the noise.

I’m learning that it is nearly impossible to hear that friend when you are running full-tilt toward the next deadline. I realized that if I’m going to survive this launch without becoming that raccoon again, I can’t do it alone. I need a sanctuary, a place to practice what I’m preaching, and I suspect some of you might need one, too.

Writing Art Is How God Loves Us helped me experience art as a spiritual gateway; this week, I realized I need to walk through that gate again myself. And I don’t want to do that alone.

An Invitation: a book club for the weary soul

I know some of the weight you carry—the heavy backpacks of perfectionism, the “black trash bag energy1” we use as we try to overhaul our lives, and the simple, bone-deep weariness of a world that doesn’t notice the light in our eyes get dimmer from loss of hope and energy to care. I know from my coaching clients and from meeting readers that I’m not alone in my struggle to stay connected to the Source of creative joy.

Because here’s the thing: I don’t want to just sell you a book. I want to sit in the thin places with you, to let art be the thread that leads us back to the Creator who is already delighting in us, to use the book and, more importantly, the art that inspired it, to call us home to our truest selves.

So here is your invitation to: The Sacred Studio.2 A launch team, but less selling and more soul.

We will meet on Tuesdays in June (June 2, 9, 16, 23, and 30) from 12:00-1:30 PM EST to trade trying hard for sacred wonder.

Week 1: June 2, The Spark of Seeing

• Chapters: 1 & 2

• Focus: Shifting our “God concept.” Seeing the “Jackson Pollock-ness” of our messy lives not as a problem, but as the medium God is using.

• Art: Van Gogh’s Olive Trees or Jan Vormann’s Dispatchwork.

Week 2: June 9, The Work of Listening

• Chapters: 3 & 4

• Focus: Trading manic striving for the act of paying attention. Learning to “hang on to the thread” of our calling when the middle feels messy.

• Art: Brahms’s Symphony No. 1.

Week 3: June 16, Navigating the Shadows

• Chapters: 5, 6, & 7

• Focus: Identifying “shadow careers” and the “simple gifts” we overlook. Seeing art as a Burning Bush that calls us out of hiding and into the malleable clay of transformation.

• Art: Joseph Brackett Jr.’s “Simple Gifts” or Faith Ringgold’s “Picasso’s Studio.”

Week 4: June 23, The Grace of Letting Go

• Chapters: 8 & 9

• Focus: The long let-go: moving from the “particular” (our specific griefs or art) to the “universal” (how God meets us there).

• Art: Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel or Christi Belcourt’s Wisdom of the Universe.

Week 5: June 30, The Source of Freedom

• Chapters: 10, 11, & 12 + Coda

• Focus: Moving from performance to collaboration. Seeing our entire life as a “Portfolio Life” designed by the “Creator Who Sets Free.” Finalizing our Creative Creeds together.

• Art: J.S. Bach’s “Mache dich, mein Herze rein” and Billy Collin’s “Introduction to Poetry.”

My hope is that this won’t be another thing to add to your to-do list, but an invitation to feel connected and seen. We’ll do select exercises from the book together, look at art as a spiritual gateway, and listen for what is next. The meetings will be recorded, so even if you can’t come live, you’ll be able to get the replays and rewatch them on your own time.

If you’re wondering whether or not you’d belong in a group like this, if you’re curious about what I believe and the kinds of communities we build at Artists for Joy, read more here. You can also read an excerpt from Art Is How God Loves Us (my Creative Creed) here.

Like The Artist’s Way and Artist’s Joy creative clusters, I welcome interfaith dialogue and seek to meet you wherever you are, regardless of your specific faith tradition or lack thereof.

Why else to join The Sacred Studio

You’ll receive a free advanced reader PDF of the book when you sign up, as well as regular behind-the-scenes updates and other pre-order bonuses via a private Substack group.

This is a free offering, in hopes of gathering an inner circle of friends who want to go deeper with the book before it is officially out in the world.

When the book launches on July 7th, I’ll invite you to write a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads and share the book via word-of-mouth if you enjoyed it.

If this sounds good to you, I invite you to put your email into this form, and I’ll add you to the private Substack when it’s ready in the next week or so. I’ll be doing that manually, so hang tight if you don’t receive a welcome message right away.

Coming Home

I know that the “atta girl” I’ve been chasing in my spreadsheets isn’t actually what my soul is hungry for. I’m hungry for the reminder that I am already loved, regardless of how many emails I answer or how many books I sell. If you’ve been reaching for the “garbage” of striving lately, too, maybe this is our chance to put down the heavy load. Let’s stop running, put our hands up, and let the beauty of art lead us back to the very heart of God.

I can’t wait to see you there.

You in? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

The Bridge

What does it mean
that I love the bridge best?
That I only start to listen
when the melody loses its way?

The chorus coaxes
even the most reticent to sing
the verse’s steadiness pulls
like a puppy on a leash.
What does it mean
that it all feels hollow
without the bridge?

The chords grow restless,
a key we did not expect,
a dissonance not authorized,
the bridge begs—
Is this the song
we thought we knew?

Loving the bridge is
setting out for the tomb
while it’s still dark,
a desperate faith
that the song isn’t over,
longing for a life that is more
than chorus-verse-chorus
enough to awake,
to walk into the darkness alone.

How far I have wandered
from my safe, familiar melodies:
the bridge, a father, running
across the wilderness of my own making,
calling my name.

What does it mean
that I love most
the moment
before the chords
tumble home?

What does it mean
that I want a miracle
that is more than a morning?

That I want Love that’s a bridge—
One who keeps singing to me,
even in the dark?

“REPRESENTATIVE!”

I whisper-screamed into the bottom end of my cell phone loud enough for the computer to hear me and soft enough not to wake my children in the next room.

Then came the silence of the transfer. During the next few seconds of clicking, I imagined my call as a blue light traveling through the wires underground like a high-speed internet commercial.

“Please hold for a human,” the bot said.

Five minutes and two beeps later, a living, breathing, flesh-and-blood human woman with an accent I couldn’t place or totally understand gave me the refund I was seeking. The whole call took me about seven minutes; six of those were getting through the automated AI assistant to a human person.

Please hold for a human.

I’d never heard it put like that before.

My husband, Edwin, has no fewer than 405 tabs open at any one moment on his laptop. I’m not even exaggerating, the little windows are so small it is hard to individually click one. Does this give anyone else anxiety? Just me?

Anyone who knows him well knows he’s an evangelist at heart, interested in cultural anthropology because he wants to understand our moment, to be an informed Presbyterian Minister of the Word and Sacrament,1 but also be the real hands and feet of Jesus in these specific days. It is admirable, if a bit intense. I wonder sometimes, reading that much, how he can stay positive. I don’t need to tell you how dark the articles and news stories on those 405 browser tabs read.

He recently guest-preached a powerful sermon about the wilderness of the information age, how being inundated by knowledge and noise affects us spiritually. As I watched the livestream, I felt the magnitude of this message. The verdict is in: We have access to more information in our pockets than any other civilization had in its libraries. And yet, we are named the Anxious Generation, the Lonely Generation; we seem to be sadder and more lost than ever. More information is not better.

The other day, we were in one of our late-night discussions about something he’d read, and he said something to me like: “In every period of time, when faced with a major technological advancement, we must name what it means to be human.”

I knew how, with the invention of the printing press, the humans of the Reformation had to recalibrate when reading was on the table. Suddenly, to be human was to hold a Bible translated into your own language. It meant no longer outsourcing the spiritual and doctrinal work to the literate church leaders, holding the word of God in your very own hands. It meant believing that, if you had a question, you could theoretically search for the answer in the volumes of your ancestors' words. It meant sitting still long enough to know the difference between “b” and “d.” (My son, who’s learning to read and write, really struggles with these letters right now!)

After that conversation at bedtime, I lie awake staring at the ceiling.

What is so unsettling to me about this moment in time is that, with each technological advancement, I feel like I am being asked to name what it means to be human over and over again, sometimes daily.

• We enter a building, walk across a bridge, and into a machine that thrusts us into the sky. I drink a ginger ale, eat Cheez-its, and check our seatbelts again. I wait for the sun to appear above the gray and consider how much the seatbelts will help if the engine fails mid-flight.

• After her bus leaves, I watch the blue dot of my daughter’s backpack make its way to school.

• On Facebook, I read about a man brutally murdered just a few miles away from my home.

• At pick up, a parent tells me she checks the registry regularly and keeps tabs on the sex offenders near our neighborhood.

All of these advancements, from a childhood without the internet to an evening where robots answer phones, explain why, in my lowest moments, I am so scared and sad. So anxious. So “connected” and yet so isolated.

It does feel like a wilderness: drowning in a bin of old cell phones, scared for what world we are leaving for our children, terrified of the evil and danger that seems to lurk around every corner, whisper-screaming into Apple’s latest gadget, and breathing a little easier when finally you hear the breath of another person, even if her first langauge isn’t your own.

Please hold for a human.

Here is the thing about the dot on the map or the data on the registry: they give us information, but they cannot give us meaning. They tell us where we are, but not who we are or why we are here.

Any writing craft book will tell you this paradox: specific details are what make writing relatable. Don’t just generally describe the street you grew up on, tell me its name. Share that your mother’s minivan smelled like Estée Lauder and stale Diet Pepsi, that your husband has 405 tabs open.

Neuroscience would probably tell us that specific details light up the parts of our brains that activate the five senses, like we’re experiencing the details ourselves—but in my limited (non-neuroscientist) basic-human words, I know this to be true: great art lights up whatever parts of my brain make me feel alive, make me feel human.

Sometimes, my children and I take my phone—the same device that seems to tether me to the wilderness—and use its macro lens to photograph our own eyeballs. We sit on the edge of the couch and zoom in until the screen is filled with the intricate, mossy forests or amber bark of our irises. We look at the tiny, unique filaments of color with hushed awe. At the pediatrician's, a handheld computer can scan my daughter’s pupils and tell us instantly if she needs glasses, but it cannot sit in wonder at her unique hazel.

It takes a human to look at a human and see a masterpiece.

This is the quiet, persistent heartbeat of the arts, of all the humanities. While the sciences seek to measure the world, the humanities seek to find our place within it. It is the study of the “Ok, but, so what?”—the refusal to let the facts stand alone without a heart to interpret them.

Artists have been singing of our humanity for all time and eternity. I believe we have the truest words to describe the intricacies of the human experience, consciousness, a sense of self, memory, and meaning-making. Perhaps science can explain it now, perhaps the computer AI models are smarter and faster, but are they wise? Do they feel?

And so, to artists who feel the shadow of the algorithm lengthening over their desks or their instruments: we must keep going, even in the face of anxiety, fear, and loneliness. We must not confuse our creativity, our truest, most human testimony of this life, with content, as much as the social media voices would like us to.

In an age of artificial intelligence, your human intelligence—limited, griefy, curious, persistent, scrappy, willing to be wrong—is the most radical thing you have to offer.

What if we valued incarnation more than information?

When I read the gospels, I love to read them through the lens of Jesus’ humanity, our Creator’s embodiment. Jesus rested. He retreated on his own to pray. He ate and drank and slept and wept. I like to imagine him having acid reflux or a migraine.

It’s easy to miss Jesus’ humanity, but it is there. And he didn’t just save humanity in a general, algorithmic sense; He saved people. He put specific mud on a specific blind man’s eyes, and he made a humble breakfast for his human friends. I like to imagine them smelling the fish cooking atop the fire on the beach.

In a world of open tabs and blue dots, we are tempted to live in the general and impersonal. But Jesus’s life reminds me that God lives in the specific, the personal. When I write about the smell of my mother’s perfume or the shaky way my son draws a “b,” I am participating in the very thing God did when Jesus took on flesh. I am saying: This specific, personal, human thing, this life, matters.

We have seen, more than any generation of humans so far, perhaps, the limits of humanity. The weakness. The end of our knowledge. And instead of it making me afraid, instead of living in fear, and outsourcing my sanity to yet another computer, I want to trust God, the Creator, the storyteller, the handiwork maker, the Artist. I want to value human life as God did, because God became human and redeemed our existence once and for all on the cross.

And so what does it mean to be human now? I have been keeping a list in my Notes app—again, using the very machine that distracts and threatens to dehumanize me— to ground and strengthen me in these wilderness days.

Here’s my list so far:

Being human means…

• I am not a machine to be optimized; I am an unfinished poem that God is still writing.

• I am not a data point to be tracked; I am the person my children look for at pick up.

• I am not my productivity, my speed, or the sum of potential knowledge hidden in the open tabs.

• I am the first timid steps on the driveway when the ice seems like it is finally melting.

• I am not the statistics or prognosis or treatment options. I am the heavy heart and the anxious mind when I see those I love aging.

• I am not a smart watch for tracking rings on my walk; I am the grief of counting rings of the tree that didn’t survive the ice storm.

• I am the catch in the throat during Barber’s Adagio.

• I am not the unchecked arrogance of computer-automated response; I am the humble and curious inaccuracy. I am the freedom of “I don’t know.”

• I am the “b” and the “d” my son practices with a shaky crayon, the aggressively exuberant birdsong this time of year, the way sourdough starter smells like life and decay at the same time, the way the pressure behind my temples rises before the first note of the Bach concerto.

Maybe the wilderness of this age isn’t something to be solved by a faster processor, but something to be walked through like Jesus did— preaching to himself the truths his heart knew, leaning into his humanity and his need for God, rejecting the shortcuts of an easy life, not giving in to fear, anxiety, and isolation, as tempting as it is.

Art holds the door open to another kind of information.

It invites us to stop screaming “REPRESENTATIVE” into the void and instead, to hold.

To hold the knowing and the not knowing, to hold each other, and to hold space for the messy, inefficient, joyful reality of a flesh-and-blood life.

We are in the wilderness, yes. But the wilderness is where the artists have always lived, making paths where there were none, reminding us to stay on the line. Don’t hang up.

Please hold for a human.

The wait may be long, but the person on the other end is always worth it.

What does it mean to be human in these days to you? What is beautiful about it? What is difficult? Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments! ⬇️

A Mountaintop Moment

11 He said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind, and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake,

12 and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire, and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.

13 When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” -1 Kings 19: 11–13 (NRSVUE)

I can recall exactly two times in my life when I’ve heard a (seemingly1) direct message from my Creator.

The first one was in graduate school. I lay on the parquet floor of my studio apartment in New Haven, CT. I asked, to the silence: What am I supposed to do with my life? Through my tears, I heard2 God say, “Get up. Go practice.”3

The second time I heard such a voice was a couple of weeks ago. In church, of all places.

It had been a particularly busy week, and Edwin (my pastor-husband) and I had not made time for him to read to me what he was working on, like he usually does. This ritual has actually become one of my favorite parts of our life. Late in the week, we curl up on the couch or sit across the table, and he practice preaches his sermon for that Sunday. He gets my comments and suggestions, I get a preview; It’s a win-win. (Haha, at least for me!) But what I love most about this weekly sermon dress rehearsal is how it inspires me— to write, to seek, to read, to think more deeply.4

Now, none of that had happened this particular week. We were in the heart of winter in Michigan. The children were sick, or I had been traveling—I can’t exactly remember— but that Sunday morning, I sat in our truly stunning sanctuary, looking up at my husband in the pulpit, ready for a word. I listened intently to my love preach on Elijah in the cave. I realized how distracted, how busy, I’d been up until that moment. I took a deep breath for the first time in many days.

The sermon was part of a series titled Mountaintops, in which we reflected on mountaintop moments of faith by examining Bible stories set there. You can listen to the full sermon from that Sunday or read the transcript here.

In the story, Elijah heard God in the still, small voice—not in the wind, not in an earthquake, not in the fire, but in a whisper. In the sermon, Edwin kept repeating a part of the dialogue I’d never noticed before. God’s question to the prophet, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” is asked more than once.

Edwin’s litany became:

What are you doing here, Elijah?

What are you doing here, Edwin?

What are you doing here, Kirk in the Hills?

Turns out, when you look at the scriptures, an all-knowing, omnipotent God is constantly asking questions. And this one for Elijah, Edwin named, was an invitation to consider our purpose, our mission. It was a beautiful reminder of how, to God, the questions and the process of answering them are often more important than the answers themselves. Jesus asked over 300 questions in the Gospels and answered only five.

As a coach, a professional question-asker perhaps, I have seen the power of a well-placed, “effective5” question and how it opens the artist I am coaching to a whole world of answers within them. I’ve seen God work in my life through questions—that I read in scripture, that I ask my clients —but that moment in worship, I realized my life, my mind, were too loud. The “still small voice” or “sheer silence” had been drowned out by the noise of my busyness.

At the end of the sermon, Edwin asked the whole congregation to pause, to listen for what question God may be asking of them, right then and there, and so we did.

And that was when, as clear as day, I heard in my heart,

What are you waiting for, Merideth?

As I mentioned in “What’s bringing me joy this winter” on the podcast last month, I am participating this year in Life in the Trinity Ministry’s Enneagram Cohort with none other than Suzanne Stabile. I’ve read every word she’s ever published and listened to likely hundreds of hours of her podcast and online workshops, too.

Suzanne’s was a gentle voice of invitation when I began learning about my personality, the innate blessings within it, and the (often more obvious) ways it holds me back. Honestly, this has been the true gift of the Enneagram for me; this is what makes it different from a basic personality test or StrengthsFinder. It is not just the recognition, nor the sense of being understood or known, but the clear labeling of my failure, or even my sin, that has profoundly changed my life and relationship to faith. If that sounds a bit intense, it is, but in a good way.6

Here’s an example: At the cohort’s first meeting, we sat around Suzanne as she taught, long tables in the shape of a U. We each had been given a nameplate with our first name and Enneagram number on it. (Think United Nations, but with our personality identifier instead of our nationality!) As Suzanne began discussing the withdrawn stance (that includes 4s, 5s, and 9s), I knew what was coming.

When she got to the 4s, I started to squirm a little. “You’re in the feeling center, and thinking supports feeling. You are doing repressed.”

There it was, this phrase I had been dreading and had come prepared to ask about.

At the end of the first day, I did have a chance:

“I’m one of the most doing people I know. I am so busy. I don’t see how I could be doing repressed.”

She smiled and said something like, “I know you are busy. We all are, and 4s have big dreams and often lots of plans. You have no problem doing the things you enjoy or even going after the things you dream of doing, but what about the dishes? What about the taxes? What about the less glamorous work of bookkeeping, the routines, the often-boring, integral tasks of life? How are you at doing those?”7

My heart beat hard. The other 4s looked knowingly across the room at me.

She added, “Developing the repressed center is one’s life work.”

I sighed. Gulped. Blinked hard and long. Later, I asked a follow-up:

“Ok. So…I do have a doing problem. But how sad! I don’t want to dread those basic life tasks. Especially the motherhood stuff. These routines—the housekeeping and childrearing and book balancing and bedtime and dinner and scales and editing and laundry— I’ve lived long enough now to know that this stuff is life. The rest is just the mountaintop moments (there’s that word again). So, how do I change my relationship to doing?”

In the Kirk sanctuary, on the mountaintop with Elijah, just a couple of weeks after that day in Dallas, the answer came.

Sheer silence, a still small voice.

What are you waiting for, Merideth?

What I am waiting for

I’ll tell you what I’m waiting for.

I’m waiting to finish my work before I unload the dishwasher.

I’m waiting for the sun to come out and the snow to melt and the mud to dry before I take a walk.

I’ve waited for us to have zero debt before I feel secure.

I’ve waited for the kids to sleep through the night before I feel like a good mother.

I’ve waited to get a “real job” to feel good enough.

I’ve waited for a book deal before I feel like a “real writer.”

I’ve waited for another book deal to feel like a “REALLY REAL writer.”

In that room in Dallas at the feet of a longtime mentor, in that church sitting below the pulpit listening to my husband preach a sermon I’d never heard, I realized the depths of my doing repression, the ways I only feel and think my way forward, the ways I do not trust God, the ways I hold myself back out of fear and scarcity. The ways I dread huge parts of my actual life.

What are you waiting for?

What a gift this question has been in this season of my life.

It is a gentle mirror, a firm nudge. For a 4, or anyone prone to “doing repression,” it cuts through the fog of preparation and dread, getting straight to the heart of resistance.

Here’s what I am learning:

1. There are no “ideal conditions.”

We tell ourselves we’ll start when we feel more inspired, when we feel like it, or when our internal or external “weather” is more stable. The question made me see that “the right time” is a moving target. God meets us in the messy reality of now, not the curated perfection of later.

2. There is a difference between resting and avoidance.

There is a holy kind of waiting (Sabbath, patience, gestation), and then there is a fearful kind of waiting (procrastination, hiding, stagnation). Developing my repressed center means knowing the difference.

If the answer is “I’m waiting for God to move,” that might mean peace. If the answer is “I’m waiting to want to,” that’s a signal to move in the midst of resistance. (By the way, sometimes the act of moving and doing makes me want to move and do! Inertia. Go figure.)

3. Confirmation is not required for contentment.

We often wait for an external sign—a “green light” from God or a sense of perfect internal alignment—before we allow ourselves to experience joy and goodness. We want confirmation that we are on the right track before we let ourselves be okay or even grateful.

We can’t hold our gratitude or joy hostage until things are “perfect.” We must practice contentment right here in the mess, realizing that God’s presence isn’t waiting at the finish line. God is here in the room while the paint dries and the trash starts to smell. Contentment says, “I have enough to be grateful for now,” or “I have what I need to get started now,” even if the big answers haven’t arrived yet.

4. I seek validation, but what I really need is courage.

Sometimes, when we ask “What am I waiting for?”, the honest answer is: I’m waiting for someone to validate me, to tell me I’m good enough, or to promise me I won’t fail.

By identifying what you are waiting for (validation, safety, certainty, proof of concept), we can take those specific things to God, inviting God to give us the courage we need to try anyway, to let go of the outcome and the power it has to paralyze us.

On the very morning I will finish writing this, a dreary, cold March daybreak waits outside my window. I consider my walk. The forecast says there is a 70% chance of rain. What are you waiting for whispered again in my heart. I put on some boots and the coat with the hood. As I rounded the corner at the top of the driveway, a heavy raindrop, waiting for me on the tip of a tree limb, washed the crown of my head like a baptism.

So join me as I get busy doing.

Don’t wait for circumstances to improve before you decide to feel joy. Name the joy that’s here now.

Don’t wait until you know what to say before you start writing. Start writing and listen for what is yours to say.

Don’t wait for the war to end before celebrating the birthday.

Don’t wait until you feel like it.

As C.S. Lewis said, “The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.”8

If you’re waiting for God to act, whether you're at peace or not, look around in the meantime, and ask Suzanne’s favorite question to everyone, regardless of their number:

What is yours to do?

Elijah fled to his mountain cave in despondency. Even after all the miracles he’d seen, he felt alone and abandoned by God. The angel fed him, and he slept and rested.

Sometimes what is ours to do is rest.

Sometimes what is ours to do is the dramatic step of starting a new project; other times, it is the humble, repeatable work of a life well-tended. It is the dishes, the taxes, the patient tending of small children—the very tasks I once dismissed as a distraction from my “real” work. Now, I see that these are not the waiting room of life; they are the sanctuary where the still, small voice, with its gentle yet firm questions, calls me out of my personality and into something deeper and more whole.

Suzanne’s question, “What is yours to do?” is no longer a search for a spectacular calling on a mountaintop, but a radical acceptance of the “yours” that is right here, right now.

The rain will fall, the sink will fill, and the future will remain uncertain. But the question has shifted from if I will move to how I will move. The answer is: now. The answer is: trusting God, even when, especially when, I don’t feel like it.

I know when I do, I’ll move with my full, flawed, imperfect self, finding the sacred not in the achievement, but in the trying, finding the joy not in the action, but in the doing itself.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have sufficiently dried off from my walk in the rain. I have a date with a sink full of dishes that I can no longer dramatically wait to feel “inspired” to wash.

Prompt: The Question You Carry

We can approach our spiritual lives with a list of requests. But today, I’d like to invite you to listen for a question.

A good Guiding Question acts like a compass. It’s a quiet refrain that follows you through the grocery store, into your studio, and through the rhythm of your week. It isn’t meant to be solved or answered, but to be lived.

Set aside your internal to-do list and listen for a Guiding Question God might be whispering to you.

• Is it a question of permission? (“What if you have everything you need?”)

• Is it a question of presence? (“Where are your feet right now?” or another favorite from scripture, Exodus 4:2, God to Moses: “What is that in your hand?”)

• Is it a question of release? (“What is yours to carry?”)

In the comments, I’d love to hear: What is the question following you lately?

Here’s to living the questions, to washing the dishes,

Merideth

If you’re new here: Hello and welcome! 👋🏻 If we haven’t met, I’m a classical oboist, creative coach, and author dedicated to the belief that the creative struggle is actually a sacred one.

I’ve written two books: The Artist’s Joy and my newest one, Art Is How God Loves Us, which comes out in July 2026. It is available for preorder now.

I publish my Substack essays every other Friday, and you can catch a new episode of my podcast, Artists for Joy, on the alternate weeks via my website, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast app.

Subscribe now

Today’s liturgy traditionally centers on Psalm 51, in which David pleads, “Create in me a pure heart, O God.” It is a cry for a fresh start, a stripping away of the ego to make room for something holy.

In this essay, I reflect on a pivotal moment at Juilliard when I stepped into a windowless audition room to play an excerpt from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. On that day, the music felt like a direct conversation with the Creator; it was, without question, the best audition of my life. I finally understood what it meant to “serve the gift1” rather than my own ego—and yet, as you’ll see, the result was not at all what I expected.

Ash Wednesday reminds us that we cannot “fix” our own hearts through effort, even when we perform perfectly. I hope this story meets you here at the start of Lent with a sense of grace, especially in those places where you are tempted to strive in your own strength.

“Mache dich, mein Herze, rein” from St. Matthew Passion, J.S. Bach

Mache dich, mein Herze, rein,
Ich will Jesum selbst begraben.
Denn er soll nunmehr in mir
Für und für
Seine süße Ruhe haben
Welt, geh aus, laß Jesum ein!

Make yourself pure, my heart,
I want to bury Jesus myself.
For from now on he shall have in me,
forever and ever,
his sweet rest.
World, get out, let Jesus in!

(Translation by Pamela Dellal, courtesy Emmanuel Music Inc.)

Growing up in small-town South Carolina, when I first began belting the Bible songs in kids’ choir at Main Street United Methodist, we realized, much to everyone’s surprise, I could sing. I loved the way music felt in my chest, the songs poured out so easily and unselfconsciously. As I grew, all I wanted to do was play the beautiful music that I heard in my head, to open the score and read it effortlessly, just as our church organist, Mrs. Kerri Hall, did. My parents got us all piano lessons, and I would sit in the formal family room at the piano for hours and make up songs. I’d found the oboe almost by accident when I had the band director as my homeroom teacher in sixth grade. He’d said my personality (determined, bright, if a bit quirky) would be perfect for this instrument (difficult, poignant, if a bit quirky). So in eighth grade, I decided to quit cheerleading and get serious about music. I joined the band. I was surprised that a girl from the middle of nowhere, who had never heard an orchestra live before, who could barely read music, who was born into a “sports family,” had talent for this persnickety, mysterious woodwind that everyone thought was a clarinet.

But yet, early in my musical life, alone with myself, I heard this question chasing me like an unpaid toll, “Am I good enough?”

Fast forward through the decades of intense conservatory training, including a boarding school for the arts, a Fulbright to Germany, and a stint in the Ivy League, decades of out-running that question, brought me to Juilliard, a place that has a way of making the most abundant riches of talent look like pennies.

I wasn’t a stand-out star in the studio, and everybody knew that, including me. First, I was five to ten years older than everyone. As a doctoral student, I felt I should be ahead of the eighteen-year-olds who played circles around me. Plus, the program was a challenging mix of academically demanding coursework, led by a panel of Harvard graduates who expected us to be scholars, set against an equally intense, competitive music performance program that demanded at least four hours of practice per day, plus reed-making. Up until that point, I had managed to hold on to my joy of music, if by a thread. But in the Juilliard years, I sensed a crescendo from the ensemble of my fragile ego, fear of failure, and a seemingly ever-decreasing natural aptitude or talent. By my second year at Juilliard, things were beginning to fall apart in a cacophonous mess of self-loathing and shame.2

That’s when I received an invitation to audition for a very prestigious summer festival. It was an unadvertised search for one oboist to fill a coveted spot in a chamber music program, and winning meant you had “made it.” Name a famous oboist in the U.S., and most have taken part in this young artist training program.

As I waited for my audition outside the large wooden doors in the Rose Building, in the middle of a city full of people more talented than I felt I would ever be, I sighed. I looked down at the scores in my hand, an aria from J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, “Mache dich, mein Herze, rein” on top. On the upper corner of the first page, I’d translated the text in my intermediate German: “Make yourself pure, my heart.”

I had seen this text many times, “sung” the words in my head as I practiced for hours. Bach’s setting is joyful yet pleading, with that perfect mixture of graceful lilt and heartfelt lyricism that only Bach could write. It comes near the end of, in my opinion, his best piece, the St. Matthew Passion, an oratorio (a dramatic vocal work similar to an opera but without staging), which tells the story of Jesus’s arrest and death. The text from the aria is not drawn from scripture but inspired by it. It was written by one of Bach’s most popular lyricists, Picander. “Mache dich, mein Herze, rein” or “Make yourself pure, my heart,” comes right after the emotional climax of the passion story, right after Judas betrays Jesus. Bach’s placement of the song there felt to me like he was saying: Before we follow Jesus to the cross, we’re going to need to fix our hearts.

I looked down at my handwriting on my score. I read through my translation again. Mache dich, mein Herze, rein: Make yourself pure, my heart.

Pure? My heart felt more broken, scared, twisted, and turbulent than pure. For years, I’d thought that if I had just gotten into college for music, if I’d just won this or that audition, if I’d just landed one of the coveted spots in the Juilliard program, then I’d be satisfied—then I’d finally know that I was good enough. Yet, with each desire of my heart achieved, I looked up to find the bar moved higher and higher, always just out of reach. The more I accomplished, the less I enjoyed it. The loftier the stakes, the further I had to fall.

I realized that these auditions, these large and small judgments I was using to determine my mood, my value as a human person, were their own type of betrayal. My younger self had dreamt of this moment, of an invitation such as this, but I had abandoned her long ago, all in the name of winning.

As I stood at that doorway, waiting for the proctor to walk me in, I felt like I was teetering on the edge of the skyscraper’s roof. I wasn’t sure what would happen to my heart if I kept going like this, if I didn’t win this audition, or if I did.

At that moment, I felt the urge to pray, something I had been avoiding. All I could muster was an invocation I’d read once, that Bach scribbled at the top of some of his scores, the letters JJ, for Jesu Juva.

As I waited in yet another hallway to be judged, I whispered, “Jesus help.”

Some have called Bach the “fifth evangelist.” (After Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.) His devotion was evident in his letters and other writings, also in the asides of his well-worn Bible, discovered relatively recently, in 1934, in the attic of a Lutheran pastor’s home in Frankenmuth, Michigan. Bach wrote some of the most complex canons and fugues in existence, as well as truly transcendent cantatas that gave Scripture a new voice.

Like the composer, I had grown up a Christian. Music and faith had always gone together, and yet, somehow, especially in the New York years, my faith felt like an old story I was no longer interested in telling. The scriptures I’d memorized as a child echoed emptily in the splintered cavern of my heart. As I climbed higher and higher, God felt further and further away.

But that day in Bach’s world, everything glowed with Christ. The shadows of my shame were scattered.

When it was my turn, as I started to play for a faceless committee behind a flimsy white plastic panel, the notes of “Mache dich”—so complex that they required a meticulously designed breath map and a near-perfect reed—felt as if they were written for me. Make yourself pure, my heart, became my psalm, and in my striving—in spite of it—that day, Jesus heard my prayer. The long phrases were an exhale, an ebb and flow of some deep wave within me, emotional and harmoniously heartfelt, all of it, communion—under a control that was beyond me, beyond this realm.

In that wood-paneled, windowless room, like a friend desperate to have me healed by Jesus, Bach broke through the roof; the music dropped me right at Jesus’ feet.

The Answer

I love how David’s songbook, his prayer journal set to music: The Psalms, sits in the very center of the Bible, at its very heart. Growing up, some part of me was afraid that faith in Jesus was a purely intellectual exercise, like a stern teacher who commanded me to abandon all feelings and obey. David’s Psalms brought home for me the beauty of a messy and musical faith, the wholeness of God’s desire to love and satisfy our deepest inner longings and our most profound understanding, reasoning, thinking.

I realize, looking back, that my quite literal translation of the aria text with the reflexive verb showed my cards a bit, spiritually. “Make yourself pure, my heart,” taken at face value, might have us believe that we could heal our hearts ourselves, that by our own strength we could hold onto God and find purity through our own righteousness. I realize now that this is one reason why my faith faltered in those days, why I had such disdain for the Bible; I thought, like greatness as an oboist, true faith was only given to those with enough diligence or discipline, that to follow Jesus one must be endowed with talent and a propensity toward perfection. I thought that, like a seat in a prestigious chamber music festival, purity was achieved by a perfect performance.

That day in the audition, the Jesus I met there—the Jesus I danced with inside the world Bach painted for me—laughed, and sang to me the words of that hymn from my childhood, “Cast your deadly doing down.”

“Make yourself pure, my heart,” became an invitation from my Maker—not for me to be good enough, but to believe that through Jesus, God is good enough. What if this was what Bach meant when he called our hearts to make themselves pure? To be like David, to let God create in us a clean heart, to set our hearts again on pursuing God’s?

The verb in verse 10 of Psalm 51, “Create in me a pure heart, O God,” is the same verb used in Genesis 1, when God ordered the chaos, when creation began. Creating, then, means making something out of nothing, ex nihilo, but it also means renewal, transformation, sanctification, rebirth. The man after God’s own heart humbly asks for a clean one, and God doesn’t fix it, dust it off, or point out all the ways the man was wrong; God goes to work as an artist and creates a pure heart in him, in all of us, again and again.

As I played the most transcendent audition of my life, as Jesus and I danced to Bach’s music, God created in me a pure heart. I let go of all the ways I had been trying to earn love. I put down my impulse to make myself perfect: I had to in order to let myself be led, to be drawn beyond perfection into wholeness.

This time, when I asked if I was good enough, I heard Jesus whisper, “I am.”

A God after your own heart

We are eager to take the matter of purifying our hearts into our own hands, aren’t we?

In Bible study, I learned that when the Scriptures use the word “heart,” it means more than one’s emotions. The Hebrew word לב (transliterated as “lev”) is more a holistic inner landscape that encompasses our feelings, but also includes reason, intellect, conscience, and intention. So, when David, in Psalm 51 prays, “Create in me a pure heart, oh God, and restore a right spirit within me,” and later “restore to me the joy of your salvation,” he means, let my heart burn with love for you again, but also, help me remember with my heart, soul, and mind that the healing you bring is joy. Purity comes from healing, not the other way around.

It’s easy to read Bach’s aria text or Psalm 51:10 and write off the idea of purity as something obsolete for those living outside of Jewish law. In Ancient Israel, the idea of ritual cleanliness meant being able to enter the Temple, to fully participate in God’s work in the world, in community with others, reassured that the glory of God would not destroy you as you drew near. Purity was more than being without sin, cleaned up, and “fixed.” It was living in alignment with reality, to know that God is the Master of the Universe, and we are God’s. It is letting ourselves be healed; we cannot do that for ourselves.

Even if we aren’t living within Jewish purity laws, we still long for a “right spirit,” our joy to be returned to us. I sensed, even in my spiritual wandering, that it would take something drastic, like a pure heart, to get through life without being crushed by the weight of my own ambitions.

The anxiety and temptation to idolatry that can creep in with our fears about talent—these are a heart issue. God meets us there to heal it.

As I sang through my oboe Make yourself pure, my heart, I realized that creative endeavors are not how we achieve and excel, nor prove our value as a person, but a place where we can be made clean. As an artist, God’s sanctification power is, first and foremost, creative.

When we serve the gift, we live inside the score of a Creator who is not after our performance, but our heart.

Getting out of the way

That day was the only day in nearly 30 years of playing the oboe where the music I heard in my head paled in comparison to what we heard in the room. Usually, it’s the opposite.

The Bach ended, and the Mozart, Strauss, and Barber that followed shimmered with a beauty I cannot, to this day, explain. I’ve written about many of these moments of transcendence, the different feelings of Ultimate Reality, Jesus Himself, Holy Spirit, a still small voice, and others that found me through art—but that day, through the music of a composer who had known what it was to follow Jesus, who had served the gift, I was delivered into the heart of God, and there my Creator created me a new, pure one.

The audition ended, and I stood on holy ground. As I packed up in the hallway to leave, I remember the proctor—who’d led me into the room, who’d been there next to me while I played—stood by, speechless. I looked up and noticed tears in his eyes. And in mine. I shook his hand and thanked him, and we both just waited in that moment, smiling.

Outside, I stopped, frozen in the Manhattan evening, suspended on the pedestrian bridge over 65th street, the city lights haloed as I let the tears of joy fall. Bach was a bridge, and I wanted to walk back to Jesus. I found myself praying, whether or not I’d won the audition, that God would never let me forget this moment.’

Lay your deadly doing down

In Bach’s Bible, there are numerous handwritten notes in the margins. One such annotation occurs near 2 Chronicles 5:13. This Scripture tells the story of when God brings the Israelites together and commands them to bring the Ark of the Covenant, the representation of God in their midst, into Solomon’s Temple, newly built/constructed. They begin to dedicate the temple with music:

“It was the duty of the trumpeters and singers together to make themselves heard in unison in praise and thanksgiving to the Lord, and when the song was raised, with trumpets and cymbals and other musical instruments, in praise to the Lord, ‘For he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever,’ the house, the house of the Lord, was filled with a cloud, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled the house of God.”

Alongside this passage, in the margin, Bach wrote, “Where there is devotional music, God is always present with his grace.”

Most don’t know that, in his lifetime, Bach struggled to find recognition and stability in his career. He was always highly respected as an organist and keyboard player in Germany and in parts of the broader European musical community, but many considered his compositions too complex, too difficult. He was passed over for many jobs; he lost many auditions. He died a respected organist, but it wasn’t until a century later, when Felix Mendelssohn was given a score of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion by his Jewish grandmother and presented it with the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig, that Bach’s music found its audience. That performance began the Bach renaissance that still continues to this day, as new manuscripts and writings resurface even in our time.

Now Bach is widely known as one of the top composers of all time, but in his lifetime, he could have easily felt he had no talent at all if he were looking to the world for validation. Plus, his life was immensely difficult, full of rejections and a lack of money, a myriad of health problems, including eventual blindness from a botched surgery. Out of his twenty children, only ten lived to adulthood. Yet, his music was a faithful witness; he served the gift. All the talent he’d been given was not for his own glory and accolade but a result of his pursuit of God.

In the story of the Temple dedication, the cloud is so all-consuming that “the priests could not perform their service... for the glory of the Lord filled the Temple of God.” This confirms something I learned in my audition: God wants to dance with us, to sing to us, to tear down the false gods of our egos with a cloud of divine presence so immense that it makes our “doing” obsolete. The swell I felt in my heart as I sang in church, the joy each oboe exhale in that transcendent audition, this was, of course, the grace of God. The Giver of Breath wants every part of us restored to joy, not just our heart or feelings, but also our intellect, our talent, our hard work, our winning, and our losing. Every note in life’s aria becomes a word from God, a life our Maker is creating, transforming even now.

World, Get Out

A week or so after my audition, when I walked in a few minutes late to our oboe studio class, I saw everyone hugging and shaking hands with a colleague who’d just learned that she’d been chosen for the festival.

It stung, to be sure, that after such a mystical experience, I wasn’t given the satisfaction of being named the winner. The months and years that followed this rejection continued to purify something in me. With a new heart, I was starting to understand what Bach said in the last line of the aria, “World, get out; Jesus, come in.” When we truly serve the gift, our offerings become a communion with our Maker, and if or when the world doesn’t recognize, applaud, or praise us for them, it isn’t a verdict of our worthiness or a judgment of our value. It’s irrelevant to a heart set on God. When we serve the gift, through sacred or secular art, in windowless rooms or ancient temples, no matter how good we are, no matter whether we win or lose, God is present with grace.

I will never create anything that compares to Bach’s music, but what I learned from living inside his heavenly compositions—what I understand from knowing him through his complex and intricate melodies, his surprising and profound harmonizations, his lesson that day in the best audition I’d ever played, that I didn’t win—is that talent is not a tool but a vessel. It is God creating us, finding within the impurities of our hearts the raw material of something greater than we can see in this lifetime. Talent is a gift God gives us of divine presence and grace. What if that is enough?

Prodigal

God has promised to provide for us what we need; like manna in the desert, there is no deficit of ideas, gigs, baselines, metaphors, and we can trust that there will be enough. This doesn’t mean we will always win. It doesn’t mean our lives will be easy. It doesn’t mean we will be loved and praised and prosperous all our lives; we have Bach and Jesus as proof that isn’t true. But we can trust that God’s plan is better than ours, that the arc of the universe is long and full of art.

If you are tempted to believe that being an artist is frivolous, that we are only useful to God when we perform acts of dramatic impact, that we are only valuable when we earn the praise of the world, remember that we are created in God’s image to create. Remember that God creates clean hearts, that God orders the chaos of creation, that God’s artistry is synonymous with God’s love.

Now, I know that when something clicks, when something happens on the stage or in the audition room that feels transcendent, when my chest swells, all these years, all along, it was the cloud of God’s presence, just as God promised, loving me, healing me. By the light of this realization, my obsession with talent feels petulant, limited. Like the elder brother in Jesus’ Prodigal Son parable, I see myself complaining that God loves others more, when God has already given me everything.

We risk missing God, present with divine grace, when we focus on the merits of our own performance.

I won’t pretend I never struggle with doubts of my own worth or talent. It did and still does hurt when I don’t succeed, but it doesn’t have the power to destroy me anymore. This is no small miracle. I know now that when I feel the very human desire to be great, it is an invitation to step aside, not by accepting mediocrity or giving up, but by serving the gift—allowing God’s greatness to come through me, trusting the Spirit will lead me, like a partner on the dance floor, through each note I play.

This is my prayer for you, and for me. That if—when—we find ourselves asking if we’re good enough, we will trust our Maker when God answers, “I AM.” That we will sing along to the Psalmist’s refrain, “his love endures forever,” and feel it in our bones. That we will let God create in us a new heart, transcending our limited earthly talents into a temple of grace. That we will realize that every time we enter the audition room or open our notebook or arrive at the easel, we step into God’s story of healing love. Before we play a note or write a word, what if this audition committee of one is already delighting in what we create?

Create in me a clean heart, O God. Amen.

I publish on Substack every other Friday, and on the alternate weeks, a new episode of my podcast, Artists for Joy, goes live on our website, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. The comments on this week’s post are open to everyone, so please say hello if you’re new around here. 👋🏻

Today, I’m sharing a story about my 15-year-old self (bangs and all) and a lesson on resistance that I'm still relearning twenty-five years later.

I was fifteen years old when I first walked the campus. Picture me: wispy bangs, hair half-up, half-down, a white tank top from NY & Co. underneath a polyester button-down in some bright green or blue, with low-rise, black boot-cut pants and the classic bow-clad Sam and Libby’s.

I’d kept the brochure for the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities inside my oboe case since beginner band. I memorized the map of the small campus from the by-then-crumpled paper. When I arrived that day for my audition and interview, I at least seemed to belong. It was my entire adolescent personality, getting into that school for my junior and senior years of high school, leaving my small town, “making it” as an oboist.

After my audition, the map led me to one of the theater buildings. Once I’d found the room, there sat two instructors behind a table, waiting for me. They introduced themselves: one from music and one from academics. The English teacher was cheerful and kind. I had memorized some vocabulary words to sprinkle throughout the interview (I wish I were kidding), and early on, managed to say “pejorative” in a real sentence like an actual human person. It seemed to be going well. The English instructor was warm, but the music professor, with his thick mustache and impossibly tall and slim frame, was gruff and standoffish. As a resident of Middle-of-Nowhere, South Carolina, I knew I needed to convince these Big City professionals that, while I lacked polish or experience, I made up for it with dedication and teachability.

We were getting to the end of the interview when the mustache leaned forward and asked, “But… do you love to practice?”

I laughed nervously. “Of course! Who doesn’t?”

Dr. David Hamilton, the towering trombone teacher and wind ensemble conductor in that interview, became one of my most beloved Governor’s School mentors; we’re in touch to this day. I remember him asking me that question so vividly. Now, twenty-five years later, if you asked me if I love to practice, I might be tempted to evade the question with a laugh and sarcastic comment all over again.

Just the other day, my 8-year-old daughter and I were talking, and I was attempting to explain (aka put a positive spin on) the fact that practicing a musical instrument can feel like a bottomless pit of effort.

She asked why we needed to practice if there were no cello lessons this week. (Her teacher had had to reschedule.)

“We don’t just practice for lessons, we practice for life. There’s always more to learn, even when you’re a pro.”

I tried to sound cheerful.

Although I was tempted to, I didn’t go so far as to tell her she should love it.

Even so, she was not impressed by my answer, and honestly, on some days (i.e. lately), neither am I.

As a professional classical oboist who also calls herself a writer (and creative coach), I’ve been thinking a lot about my historical relationship to practice and motivation and what sustainability looks like now.

What is your relationship with practicing your art form like?

I won’t ask you if you love it. Maybe sometimes you do, maybe you did once.

I already know (because many readers and podcast listeners tell me) that you let yourself fall back asleep when the alarm goes off. I know you scroll your phone when you want to be creating.

Like the Apostle Paul says (not about creativity, mind you, but capturing something true about the human experience nonetheless): “For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” (Romans 7:15)

Me too, Paul, me too.

We have vision, but we lack momentum. We have dreams, but we lack energy. We long to be proficient or prolific, but, hey, we’d settle for productive or… passable. We’d rather clean the kitchen than write. We’d rather doom-scroll than play scales.

Looking back at the young girl in her first professional interview/audition, I realize that most of her musical life up to that point, she had been practicing for a specific purpose—to get ahead, or at the very least, not get behind. I was so eager to make my dreams come true as a musician, and practicing was the only way I knew how. I didn’t love practicing per se, but I did love where the work would take me.

Even today, to borrow (and rewrite) a common quote about writing: “I hate to practice; I love having practiced.1” In some ways, I have been using shame and fear to motivate me all these years, and, as a creative coach, I know that isn’t sustainable.

This mindset still works for me today, if I’m being honest. I have so much music to learn, and many words to write and edit, so it is (in some ways) the fear of not being prepared or not feeling ready that gets my backside into the chair.

Sure, there have been times when I’ve been so in love with the art form that I couldn’t wait to soak my reeds and learn a new Bach aria—Bach always makes me love practicing—when I could see the book coming into focus and woke up early, joyfully, to get to work on it.

But, to be completely honest, even though I wrote a whole book about finding joy in creative practice, there are still days when it is ridiculously hard to sit down and do the things I most want to do, and shockingly easy to do the things I hate.

Some days, there are not enough Bach arias in the world to make me feel like practicing.

But…do you love to practice?

This question bounced around in my brain again this week. In a month of especially low motivation and lack of consistency, I felt judged and sad.

Then, in my fifth creative coaching call in two days, a new kind of answer came.

Coaching artists is such a gift. Just by listening and asking simple, potent questions, I learn so much about myself and the creative calling. I have been working with many of my clients for months, some years.

For context: I coach artists across the creative map—from professional musicians with high-pressure performance jobs, to writers just beginning to pour energy into the book project(s) they’ve dreamt of finishing, to actors and arts educators recovering from burnout, to creatively wounded makers who are working to get back out there after painful rejection.2

And amazingly, last week, with almost all my coaching clients, from all these walks of life, genres, and experience levels, across age groups and life stages, five of them came to the same conclusion: Practicing consistently makes them feel better.

Perhaps you’re thinking: Duh! But stay with me.

In our calls, we work with creative block, we solved problems inside the work that are holding them back, we troubleshoot schedules and other creative conundrums, each one as different as the artist themselves, and yet, this truth emerged for five clients (almost in a row): what improved their mood, quality of life, outlook, inspiration, and motivation was the simple act of showing up consistently. It didn’t even matter how much they made, the quality of their work, or their progress; it was the consistent showing up that made things better.

Practicing with joy doesn’t mean that you always want to, that you will always love it. What I learned this week again was that even when practicing doesn’t sound fun or even when it sounds and feels quite dreadful, the feelings on the front end of the process are, well, irrelevant.

Now, before you think I’m telling you not listen to or trust yourself, what I mean is that resistance before sitting down to practice is to be expected. Join me in not feeling surprised when that happens. In fact, the more we learn to expect and push past the resistance that will inevitably show up, the faster we will get to the good part.

One client said (and gave me permission to share):

Another gem from another client I scribbled in my coaching notes:

So this week, if I’m honest, for the first time in the new year, I was able to find some consistency. I waved at the resistance—every day—as I walked on by. I got started anyway.

I reassured myself, repeating the truth the coaching clients had taught me: the joy in consistency vibrates way beyond the creative work and right into life itself.

It worked. The more consistent I became, the better I felt about almost everything. Hope started to thaw something deep within me.

We don’t practice for lessons, we practice for life.

It was more true than even I knew.

Perhaps the secret to sustainable creative practice isn't about conjuring a love for the process (fake laugh and all), but accepting the resistance as an expected part of the trip—the “airport security line” we must get through to start our journey to where we most long to go.

We will continue to struggle with the “want to do, do not do” impulse, and the temptation to let shame and fear be our motivator. But as the collective experience of my creative coaching clients3 proves, the feelings on the front end are just part of a much longer, transformational process.

Here’s the quieter truth of creative effort: our dedication to showing up, even in the face of resistance, is a profound act of faith. Like the Apostle Paul, we are not alone in the struggle between the desire to create and the difficulty of the task. Yet, like him, we know we are called and led.

In the end, let your creative consistency be anchored not in fleeting emotion or even in the fear of falling behind, but in a profound spiritual identity. Your art, your practice, and even the struggle to show up are all part of a greater design.

As Paul writes later in his letter to the Ephesians, "For we are God’s handiwork4, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.5"

This work, then, is not merely a task to be checked off, but the very purpose for which we are made. Every time we push past the resistance—that “airport security line” of the soul—we are not manufacturing discipline; we are stepping into the good work already prepared for us.

May you trust that consistency, the quiet and repeated echo of your deepest purpose, is joy’s on-ramp, making each creative effort a holy and courageous act of faith.

So sit down. Let’s get to work.

Trust me, you won’t regret it.

What does your "airport security line" look like today? Is it a messy desk, a loud inner critic, or a scrolling habit? How can you "wave at the resistance" and walk on by this week? Tell me in the comments!6

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My creative rhythm in this season of life is alternating between the page and podcast. One week I’ll write to you here; the next, on the podcast. I’d love for you to subscribe and follow along on both. I’m honored to show up in your inbox on Fridays.

Today’s post is my annual word-of-the-year reflection. I hope it meets you wherever you are— in the joy and anxiety that mark these days.

As I climbed into the impossibly soft bed in that temporary dwelling place, I thought about what Sister Ruth1 had said when she wished me goodnight.

“We prayed for you—as we do for each person who stays here—when we prepared your room.”

I surrendered to the large, white bed in the room covered in floor-to-ceiling floral wallpaper. I squeezed my dry eyes shut. After two very long days of driving, I’d arrived at the Community of Jesus, an idyllic ecumenical monastery in Orleans, MA, situated along Cape Cod Bay. In a day and a half, I would be presenting an oboe recital as part of their Art Speaks series, a program I was calling “Music, Memory, and Meaning: How Creativity Helps Us Belong.” That first night, as the impossibly soft comforter and the cold air of the window unit enveloped me like the Sisters’ prayers, I had the best night’s sleep of my life.

When I received the invitation to perform and as my husband and I planned our summer, it felt like a no-brainer to bring the whole family and enjoy an extended weekend on the Cape, a place neither of us had ever visited. But, one by one, each of us fell ill the week before our departure. Luckily, I was the first to get the bad summer cold. When it was time to leave, I was fine, but my husband and one of the children were still running a fever. I felt OK to travel, so he sent me out the door alone. (I told the Sisters: “He’s the one who needs your prayers!”)

When I pulled up to the Community that bright July day, after sixteen hours on the road, I found a message for me on the lawn. To my astonishment, a (what looked to be) 200-foot-high, brightly colored sign read: J-O-Y-! I later learned that the lawn art installations were done by the Brothers who lived in the Community. They created and installed large-scale Peace, Hope, Love, etc., and stationed them on the main lawn for a few months each year. Pulling up in this, the lawn’s J-O-Y-! “era,” let me know I was in the right place.

Being a curious (ahem, nosy) person who loves hearing people’s life stories, the best part of my time at the Community was getting to know the Sisters. They not only prepared my cozy room but also made homemade meals with ripe vegetables from the garden, fresh bread, and any type of tea you could ever dream of. As much as I enjoyed solitude (hello, mom of two small kids), I looked forward to each meal to see which Sister would be waiting in the dining room and kitchen for me.

There was Sister Ana, who had been there when the Community started in 1961, who knew the two Episcopal lay women who dreamt the intentional community into being. Ana told me she went to Bible College to become a pastor’s wife, but quickly realized that that was not God’s plan for her. “And thank GOD!” She looked at me and raised her eyebrows. (She knew my husband was a clergyman.) Her eyes sparkled. She turned her head back and cackled.

Sister Claire had grown up in the Community (there are families, too, that live on the monastery grounds). She had never planned to be a Sister, either; in fact, she swore up and down that she’d never join the Order. She returned after college in Chicago as a seeker and never left. I asked them so many questions—some probably too personal—about their calling and their daily lives. I was genuinely curious, but also, I was astonished at their lightness, the ease and peace in their personhood, their matching tunics, a brightness behind the eyes that was hard to forget.

Here, six months later, home in Michigan, living through another record-breaking arctic blast, I’m reliving that warm weekend in the Cape. What struck me most about the experience was not the playing or speaking, not the scenery or the music (although those were lovely, too), but the soul care I received as a guest. The Sisters (and Brothers) in the Community in Cape Cod live by the Rule of St. Benedict, a way of life and order that requires sacred vows of obedience, conversion, and stability. What I noticed most in them was writ large: J-O-Y-!

As for me, I have washed up on the shore of 2026 wearier than usual.

Highlights of 2025 included: writing my second book, traveling a ton, playing a lot of oboe, my youngest starting all-day school, numerous other highlights I can’t think of right now (more on why in a minute)— plus, all the usual joys and sorrows that come along with being a human in this moment in time.

The words I chose last year were: “hang on to the thread”; with all the movement (literally and productively) that was about to occur, I knew I needed an anchor. The essay I wrote about it actually ended up in my new book. The word felt like a companion in the ups and downs of life last year, and I’m so grateful. That’s what these practices are for, right?

Well, at the end of 2025, as November and December came along, as the year barreled forward— like a freight train— to its close, while I didn’t let go of the thread, I did feel a growing resistance and soul-deep weariness. I recorded the podcast episodes for the “Give me a word” series before the holidays. I prepped for the word-of-the-year art party on January 9th, a word or two in mind, but little clarity as to what direction I was moving as the new year began.

Even now, twenty-some days in, it is still so noisy inside my head and heart. Just this week, I saw moms in a Facebook group asking about reservations for Easter brunch. I was flummoxed. Easter? I’m just trying to make it to Wednesday!

If I had to look back on the last twenty-ish days of 2026 and base my word of the year on my actual state of mind, it would have to be something like “pre-occupied.” My attention and energy are always split between work and home, between the first book and the second, between what could happen and what actually is happening in the world (both are equally unsettling, by the way). Something tells me you might feel the same.

But here’s the thing, we must remember the purpose of the word-of-the-year practice is to name how we want to show up to life. It is an intention we set.

And so, when I forced myself2 to make time to reflect this week, the first thing that came to mind was the Sisters of the Community of Jesus on Cape Cod.

Instead of pre-occupied, could I be monastic? Can one do that in my world? In a marriage? As a mother? I long to feel J-O-Y! (or even lower case with zero punctuation) in my work and my life, especially in serving others.

So, I tried it this week.

As I folded a pile of laundry that had been on the living room couch for longer than I’m ready to admit, I prayed for my family. As I matched the 856,562 rogue socks and moved to the kitchen to clean the disgusting gray debris out of the dishwasher filter, I thanked God for clothing and for food.

When I was required to make not one, not two, but three different dinners for one child, I tried cackling instead of groaning. I prayed for this little one’s developing palate.

I channeled Sister Beth as I chopped vegetables, thinking of the seasons of sunshine and rain that each one had seen. I gave thanks for the twisted, gnarly carrot as I imagined it pulled from the black earth somewhere much warmer than Michigan.

I walked. I listened to the wind and rain. I clicked the Pray As You Go devotional podcast before scrolling social media. I even read about how to do centering prayer.3

I fasted a few mornings to see if it brought more clarity. It did, but turns out reading music is much harder without my oatmilk latte.

Overall, I did feel more focused, a little lighter.

All this to say: I committed to “monastic” being my word of the year, and it has been a blessing.

But there was just one problem. A big one.

I couldn’t seem to get any writing done.

Every time I went to sit down, I passed the kitchen sink. I couldn’t help but consider what prayers and productivity were needed there. Then, everyone got sick again, a slew of snow days and other routine busters, and my monk-self got overloaded. Ora et Labora, the Rule of St. Benedict says, pray and work.

These people have the audacity to keep needing their dinner(s)—and their prayers!

The vegetables need someone to listen to their origin stories, for goodness sake!

Feel free to chuckle; I am laughing at myself, too.

With the best of intentions, I had somehow “monked” myself into a (very tidy) corner. While it was good for my home and my culinary chops, something integral was missing.

You’ve probably seen them on the news by now, the group of Buddhist monks (and a very famous rescue dog, Aloka) who are currently walking 2,300 miles across the United States, from Texas to Washington, D.C. They aren’t walking to protest or to shout; they are walking as a “moving meditation” to plant seeds of compassion and inner peace. I pray for their safety now, as I imagine the weather and the fever-pitch news cycle feel scary.

In my own “monastic” journey, when I saw these monks taking action, I decided I better do some more research.

It might be easy to look at someone entering a religious order and see their separateness from society, from everyday life, as an effort to escape reality. I realize some part of me thought that before I met the Sisters in Cape Cod. I’m sure for some it might be an effort to run from life, but it turns out this prayer-and-work thing extends beyond what I ever realized.

It was two Irish monks, Columba and Columbanus, who helped me find my way back to the page this week.

I learned that when the Roman Empire fell, literacy in mainland Europe plummeted. The Irish were tucked away on their island, and so in the Early Middle Ages (aka “The Dark Ages”), the Irish monks became obsessed with the Latin language and classical texts. They made it their work to preserve them. They didn’t just save the Bible. They loved the “Pagan” classics—Virgil, Horace, and Greek philosophy. While some Roman Christians wanted to burn these books as “ungodly,” the Irish monks thought they were beautiful and worth keeping.

Here’s what made me want to write: Brothers like Columba and Columbanus developed a unique, beautiful style of writing; they turned book-making into a high art form.

Some call this work—the behind-the-scenes translating and passing down, not just the Bible but books of great thinkers across the culture—“preserving the seed.” In the darkest days, they went about their work and prayer, fulfilling their duties within the community and beyond its walls. They created beauty, preserved it, actively believing that God was redeeming it. The Renaissance wouldn’t have been possible without these monks.4

They believed that the books not only should be expertly copied, but copied beautifully. They painted elaborate scenes and even used gold leaf to decorate the large first letters of the editions. They called this process, of making the books works of art, “Illumination.” You can see one example here.

When I read that, my own creative floodgates opened. The article I read about the Irish monks quoted Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot, “Beauty will save the world.”

It wasn’t enough to copy a text verbatim; it needed to be lovely.

As if they were saying, “For the world to really be saved, it has to be beautiful.”

As much as the monastic mindset shift has changed my outlook on housekeeping and mothering, as grateful as I am for that, I know I am also called to more. I’m still learning what creating “monastically” looks like for me.

Some call these days dark. Reading the news, I would have to agree. But I know, like the monks in the Dark Ages, like the Sisters at the Community of Jesus in Cape Cod, that if we are going to save the world, we must do it beautifully.

This is my work as an artist this year:

• To be about the work of preserving the seeds, championing and encouraging creatives who bring light, because beauty will save the world.

• To devote myself to the quieter, less Instagrammable work of spiritual growth, which looks for me like prayer walks and lectio and visio divina, and other spiritual practices I haven’t yet dared to try.

• To meet Jesus again, maybe for the first time. After “hanging on to the thread” for a year, I’m letting go and realizing that it was Jesus who has held me all along.

• To fast in ways that don’t trigger my disorder eating, to look at the hold earthly pleasures and conveniences have on me, not out of restriction or virtue, but in pursuit of a deeper, sober clarity.

• To create from a place of prayer and preservation of the seeds God has gifted me, not waiting for the noise to stop or the beds to be made, but creating in service to and in tandem with Christ himself. Believing the words will come, that they matter, that the song is not my own but comes through (and in spite) of me.

• To pray and to work. To let work be prayer. To let art be prayer. To let life be prayer.

• To labor creatively like the monks who built great cathedrals, carving stone so high that no human would ever see. They believed it was worth doing because God sees. To believe God sees.

• To let my work be less proof of my skill or talent and more an offering, a set of two-hundred-foot letters on the lawn, a signpost for weary travelers in these dark days.

Thank you for reading. What’s your word of the year? How is it going so far? Tell me in the comments!

Read more

This is our final installment of this year’s Art’s Open Door Advent Devotional, “Advent Songbook.” Check out the other posts on beautiful Advent music here on Substack and here on Artists for Joy podcast.

Today’s carol is an intentional shift in tone (!), and I hope it makes you smile and move with joy, even if/when you don’t feel like you can!

“Mi Burrito Sabanero” by Hugo Blanco Manzo featuring La Rondallitta

It was 2016. Christmas Eve. 11:30 PM.

I screamed over the music to my mother-in-law, “How’s this?”

She watched me and my new husband, her son, dance. She laughed with wise kindness.

Then, much to my surprise, she grabbed my hips and attempted to get them to sway more demonstratively from side to side.

“Relax, gringa!” She yelled with joy over the contagious Latin rhythms and children singing.

I looked at Edwin. His eyebrows raised. He flashed his trademark smile.

I never considered myself a great dancer, to be sure. I wrongly believed that, as a musician, I at least had a little rhythm.

But, here I was: my first Nochebuena (Christmas Eve) with my new Latin American family, and as the Patron Saint of Dance Music, Shakira, reminds us… the hips don’t lie.

At the Hite house growing up, by midnight on Christmas Eve, we were very much tucked into our beds, the smell of extinguished candles and struck matches still lingering in the family room. The only light would be from the towering Christmas tree brushing the top of the 16-foot ceilings of my family’s historic Victorian home.

It’s not that we didn’t dance. We did at weddings and such occasions, like the average American family. But between watching my parents in their dance of choice—the South Carolina shag (think 70s beach music)—my debutante cotillion, and Mrs. Lottie Jean’s School of Dance in Abbeville, SC—nothing prepared me for Christmas Eve with the Estevez family.

That first year we were married, Edwin was pastoring a church within a few hours of his home, and so, when we arrived at 11:00 PM, we found the music blaring, the children wide-eyed (some of them, anyway), and the tamales and coquito flowing. Edwin told me later that the celebration that year was a far cry from the party they used to have when he was a kid, but to me it felt like a rager.

When we walked into that party—I’ll never forget it— it was “Mi Burrito Sabanero,” playing. This instantly contagious Latin American Christmas staple, a Venezuelan villancico (Christmas carol), tells of a young pilgrim traveling through the savannah on a donkey to see the baby Jesus in Bethlehem. The music is in the aguinaldo style, featuring a brisk tempo and traditional instruments like the cuatro, maracas, and drums. Throughout the song, the singer chants “tuki tuki tuki tuki” imitating the sound of hooves, all while urging the little donkey to hurry up so they can complete their holy journey.

The first time I heard “Mi Burrito Sabanero,” I was walking into my first Nochebuena, willing my hips to relax (and failing), laughing at myself as the joy of new traditions washed over me.

Christmas Eve traditions are not the only thing on which Edwin and I differ.

In fact, one thing many people don’t know about us is how truly opposite we are.

A few examples: His favorite color is green; bright, springy, and full of hope.

Mine is midnight blue: deep, layered, and basically black.

Once, I came around the corner and found him staring at the lawn, longingly. He said, as he often does, “I’ve got good news, and I’ve got bad news.” I, of course, requested the bad news first.

“We have sewage leaking into our yard.”

“Ok, what’s the good news?”

“Our grass looks fantastic.”1

If you’ve followed along so far here in this “Advent Songbook” series, you may have noticed that all of the music I’ve chosen to write about this year is…well… kind of sad.

The Britten’s Harp Interlude invited us to consider solitude as a practice this Advent, as there are things we must do alone.

“Comfort Ye” from Handel’s Messiah spoke of music and God’s “withness,” a companion in the darkest days.

Paul Mealor’s “Spotless Rose” invited us to put down the highlighter in search of answers and instead embrace the holy mystery.

With "What Child is This," we explored how tender questions can open us in times of uncertainty and waiting.

Lauridsen’s “O Magnum Mysterium” reminded us to celebrate the mysteries, to listen for the ways the alleluias sneak in.

And last week, I explored how Silent Night and its creation during a major organ malfunction remind us that sometimes mishaps have to happen for the masterpiece to come through.

It’s no surprise to you, then, that I am drawn to the sadder, nostalgic, contemplative side of Christmas. There, I said it.

And, while Edwin, the merriest of husbands, does enjoy mournful music on occasion, as joyful as he is, he never makes me feel bad about my pull to the sadder side of Christmas and of life.

He doesn’t bemoan my melancholic nature, but here’s what he does do: he invites me to dance.

Every family has their share of hardships. The Estevezs have had theirs. But what “Mi Burrito Sabenero” does for us as a family is simple. It makes us stop whatever we are doing and dance in the midst of sadness and grief. The joy doesn’t discount the melancholy; it doesn’t make the hard things disappear. The rhythm is an invitation to choose joy even when you’re tired, even when it’s been a long day, a long year, even when things feel different and new and scary.

That invitation to dance is, perhaps, the most fitting way to end our journey toward the manger. Just like the little donkey in the song, we are all travelers navigating a long, dusty road, sometimes weary from the weight of our own stories and the melancholy of the world. But the rhythm of "Mi Burrito Sabanero" reminds us that the destination—the arrival of a tiny, holy Light in the middle of our ordinary lives, in these dark days—is worth every "tuki tuki" step of the way.

In the end, the Christmas story itself is the ultimate union of opposites: the heavy reality of a long journey and the ecstatic joy of a savior born; the quiet of a stable and the loud, rhythmic song of the angels. So, whether we are swaying perfectly to the beat or still trying to get our "gringa" hips to move, we are all invited to hurry toward Bethlehem, choosing to dance in the light of the morning star that promises we are never traveling alone.

Try it:

This one is simple. Play “Mi Burrito Sabanero” and move.

Whether you were born into the rhythm of a Latin American home or, like me, you were lucky enough to marry into one, whether you have no rhythm or body-awareness at all, I want to invite you to dance this Christmas.

Don’t worry about the technique or if you’re with the beat; let dancing become a spiritual practice of being present and awake to the joy that is right here.

May the music carry you through the good news and bad.

May midnight find you dancing in the midst of the longest, darkest nights.

May you trust that even the clumsiest steps are leading you home.

Merry Christmas 🎄

Thank you so much to those who have been following along here and on the podcast during “Advent Songbook.” I had a lot of fun writing and recording it. 🎙️👩🏽‍💻

If this series has resonated with you, tell me in the comments or via email at hello@artistsforjoy.org.

I’m so grateful for everyone who takes the time to read and listen.

For this year’s Art’s Open Door Advent Devotional, “Advent Songbook,” I’ll share rich examples of Christmas art and pair each piece with a devotional reflection and a practical spiritual posture to shape this season of waiting and wonder.

What to do: take time to listen and/or view the music discussed for each post. When you’re ready, read through the devotional. At the end of the written portion, there will be an invitation: something for you to try or consider in response. Listen again to the music before ending your reflection time.

Does it sound different? How is God speaking to you today through art?

Jot down anything you heard in your journal….or tell us all in the comments!

Morten Lauridsen’s “O Magnum Mysterium”

O magnum mysterium,
et admirabile sacramentum,
ut animalia viderent Dominum natum,
iacentem in praesepio!

Beata Virgo, cujus viscera
meruerunt portare
Dominum Iesum Christum.
Alleluia!

O great mystery,
and wonderful sacrament,
that animals should see the newborn Lord,
lying in a manger!

Blessed is the Virgin whose womb
was worthy to bear
the Lord, Jesus Christ.
Alleluia!

“What if I step off this train and another one never comes?”

Sarah1 and I have been meeting for creative coaching for almost six months. We have spent that time cultivating a brilliant, vibrant vision of her life as a full-time creator—a painter, entrepreneur, and arts educator. The dream is becoming clearer with each session; in fact, she has been putting very real things in place to quit the soul-crushing day job that zaps her energy and steals her joy. And yet, week after week, she has hesitated to resign.

I see this with many of my beloved coaching clients. Dreaming of the future is one thing; making it a reality is another. Sarah, like so many artists I know, is paralyzed not by lack of skill, but by The Great Mystery that lies beyond her stable paycheck: What if all of this fails? What will I do then?

When I asked her to find a metaphor or an image that represented what quitting her job felt like, she imagined herself on a train. She felt the brakes; she could see a station ahead. Would she exit this timely, safe, consistent mode of transportation that was headed to a perfectly lovely life? The problem was this: the life this train was heading toward was not for her. She knew that. The train was slowing down now. Why not just step off? She imagined herself waiting on the platform alone—What if I’m too late? What if I don’t get anymore trains?

This fear of the unknowable future is perhaps the most profound mystery we face as adults. We are trained to quantify, to predict, to minimize risk. Yet the creative life—every life—invites (requires?) us to embrace the mystery.

Beauty of Belief

I’ve stood on my fair share of train platforms. In my book, I shared about one of my biggest leaps of faith—when I left a full-time teaching job to live in the same city as my husband. Looking back on my own instances of taking leaps of faith, I’m struck by how strong I look in those moments, when all I can remember is the fear, the anxiety, even the despair, that I felt stepping into the unknown.

Writing this, I realize that one thing I love most about creative coaching is that I get to be there on the imaginary platform with the artist who takes the step. We do not spend time predicting future earnings or guaranteeing success. Although we do make concrete plans for what happens next, we focus most on the act of stepping.

We acknowledge that we don’t have the full map.

We don’t know exactly how the client roster will grow, whether galleries will call, or where the next unexpected opportunity will come from.

We name how scary that is.

We connect with what matters most—that we know we can’t stay in the life we are currently in forever, that this train is heading somewhere we don’t want to go, that we love ourselves enough to do the hard thing.

There is beauty in the belief itself, in hearing another person begin to live in congruence with who they know they were born to be.

It’s an honor and a privilege to watch artists take these steps into their own great mystery, trusting that it will lead them to a more resonant and joyful life.

In today’s Advent Songbook, Morten Lauridsen’s setting of “O Magnum Mysterium” (O Great Mystery) speaks of such faith in the face of mystery. Not unlike the style of Mealor’s “Spotless Rose,” the music spends most of its time suspended in a beautiful, dense, and slightly ambiguous harmonic world. The low, long notes and shimmering cluster chords don’t explain the mystery of Jesus’ coming; they hold it, allowing the listener to feel the profound wonder of the inexplicable.

This is exactly where Sarah is, where we all stand at times: suspended in the beautiful, yet terrifying, unknown.

Alleluia Anyway

If you listen closely and watch the score of the Lauridsen on the video above, you’ll see it— a moment of revelation. Around 4:15, you’ll hear it: after contemplating the silent awe of the mystery (”that animals should see the newborn Lord...”), he introduces the “Alleluia.”

And here’s what I love most about this piece: when the “Alleluia” slips into the texture, it does not make the music tonally clear or rhythmically straightforward. We don’t find clarity; in fact, it adds to the beautiful chaos. The “Alleluia” is woven on top of the harmonic richness, while the other text continues to be sung at the same time! This declaration of joy and faith doesn’t erase or clarify the unknown; it affirms it.

It is not just the miracle that this “Alleluia” is praising, it’s the mystery.

In Ann Lamott’s book, Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy,2 she says, “I still believe in the grace of the not-knowing, and in the beautiful risk of the attempt.” She agrees with Lauridsen then, that mercy and grace often reveal themselves during the act of stepping into the mystery, not before or after. The “Hallelujah” (Or Alleluia, depending on your spelling) is not the reward for a job well done; it’s the internal recognition of wonder that happens when we show up, imperfectly, for life, when we take a step, even when—especially when—we can’t see the future.

This Advent, I don’t know about you, but I want to get better at praising God for the miracles and for the mysteries.

This one is for Sarah

At the time of my writing this, Sarah still hasn’t given her notice. I know others in my life who feel a junction coming, too, who are afraid to step off their own trains. We all look for proof that the future is secure, that all will be well. And I want to invite Sarah (and you and me) this Advent to believe that, in Christmas, in Christ, all is being made well.

We can sing the “Alleluia” right in the middle of the mystery.

The Magnum Mysterium of Christmas—that God would choose to bring salvation (from the Latin word for “healing”) this way: through a child born not in a hospital but in a stable, at a birth not known about by dignitaries or attended by official royal midwives but—get this— by animals. It’s almost comical in its joy.

What if God has joy for you in the unknown, too?

Here’s another mystery—one that I have seen in my own life over and over, and in the lives of brave clients and friends who take the step off the train, who follow their unique calling: God’s grace and mercy meet us on the platforms and in the resignation emails, in the detours and the unwritten chapters. There is no step we take alone. Our “Alleluia” isn’t about finding the perfect business plan or securing the future (which is impossible, by the way); it's about choosing praise and affirmation despite the dense, unknowable texture of the path ahead.

For Sarah, and for all of us standing at a junction, the future remains shrouded in the beautiful, dense mystery we find in the heart of Advent. It is the courageous belief that grace meets us not in guaranteed clarity, but in the vulnerability of unknowing, just as God’s salvation entered the world not with the roar of a conqueror, but in the silent awe of a stable.

This Advent, let us embrace the mystery of who we are being called to be.

Let us believe it is not too late, that there will be other trains.

That joy waits for us right here and in the future.

Let Alleluia be the song we sing from the platform, before the clarity comes: a declaration of faith and joy woven through the rich, yet ambiguous harmony of this life, trusting that grace meets us, even in the great unknowing.

Try it

To practice an invitation into the Great Mystery, let us open our hands. Throughout your days of decision or doubt, when the impulse to quantify, predict, or panic about the future arises, try this simple, physical act of surrender: consciously open your hands.

Let them rest, palms up, even for a moment as you listen to the music again.

This is a quiet, powerful declaration that you do not hold the map, and that the future is not yours to secure.

Just for a moment, rest in the unfolding of the present, choosing to be a participant in the mystery rather than its frantic manager.

This Advent, may the waiting itself be the sacred ground where grace can meet you.

Share any thoughts in the comments, I’d love to hear them.

If you are someone looking for a companion on the empty platforms of the creative life, or considering a career or life shift, I have some coaching openings in the new year, as well as a few spots left in our Creative Leap Mastermind, which starts in January 2026. Learn more from the links below or email me hello@artistsforjoy.org with questions.

The Advent Songbook will come out in twice-weekly installments to bookend your week. You can subscribe to the Monday Substack emails via the button below and find Friday’s posts on Artists for Joy podcast, via Apple, Spotify, or our website.

Subscribe now

For this year’s Art’s Open Door Advent Devotional, “Advent Songbook,” I’ll share rich examples of Christmas art and pair each piece with a devotional reflection and a practical spiritual posture to shape this season of waiting and wonder.

What to do: take time to listen and/or view the music discussed for each post. When you’re ready, read through the devotional. At the end of the written portion, there will be an invitation: something for you to try or consider in response. Listen again to the music before ending your reflection time.

Does it sound different? How is God speaking to you today through art?

Jot down anything you heard in your journal….or tell us all in the comments!

Subscribe now

A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
² The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him,
the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the spirit of counsel and might,
the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.

Isaiah 11:1-2

“Spotless Rose” from Now Sleeps The Crimson Petal (Four Madrigals on Rose Texts) by Paul Mealor

A spotless Rose is growing,
Sprung from a tender root,
Of ancient seers’ foreshowing,
Of Jesse promis’d fruit;
Its fairest bud unfolds to light
Amid the cold, cold winter,
And in the dark midnight

The Rose which I am singing,
Whereof Isaiah said,
Is from its sweet root springing
In Mary, purest Maid;
For through our God’s great love and might
The Blessed Babe she bare us
In a cold, cold winter’s night.

Devotional: Cadence to Cultivation

Halfway through my twelve-year stint in college for music, I was in a graduate theory class when my professor laid a bright yellow marker across my Brahms Requiem score and tasked me: “Find every leading tone.”

If you’ve learned the basics of harmony and part-writing, you know—every note in the Western classical style has an “expected” resolution. Scale degree two resolves to one. Four to three. Seven to eight—this is the “leading tone” action the professor spoke of, by the way! I can confidently report that of the hundreds (?) of D’s and A-naturals in that epic Brahms movement, every single leading tone resolved “correctly.”

I put many of those words in quotes because, as my professors often said, music theory is, after all, just a theory.

Don’t get me wrong, tonal music, with all its rules and hieroglyphics, is a theory I love. As a perfectionist (ahem, control freak), it's deeply satisfying to put basically every note in its place. We start in one location and move to another, and with many green, pink, and yellow scribbles later, the music shimmers with a rightness, a clean sink in a tidied kitchen. Oh, that’s what the composer was doing! Got it!

What we long for most in life is fulfilled (at least on a small scale) in many forms of art, whether we understand how it works or not. The highlighter’s lines confirm one of our most profound longings: consonance, peace—every dissonance, explained.

This week, I turned 42. I had the distinct pleasure of returning to New York City, a place I called home in another decade of my life. In a post about returning to teach a workshop at Juilliard twelve years after graduating, I used the word “full circle.”1 On the flight home, I put in my headphones, and Paul Mealor’s “Spotless Rose” came up on my Advent playlist. When this music hit me in that moment, I realized it all over again—I was still looking for resolutions, as if my life were in sonata form.

I have taken more than one highlighter to my life’s score, I will say that. I’ve stood silently screaming at the sky, asking God for answers when things fell apart. I’ve memorized the cracks in my bedroom ceiling like it was some barely tonal symphony of Shoenberg. I’ve been unable to enjoy the current gig I'm in for fear it might be my last. I longed for some confirmation that I was ______ enough— to be loved by God, but also to earn some official praise from the world that would stick and once and for all, give me lasting joy or at least contentment.

Sure, I knew life would include some non-harmonic surprises. Who doesn’t love an occasional deceptive cadence? But as I sat on the plane home from NYC, in these first frigid days of being 42, I realized that one gift of this decade is the full-on dissipation of the theory that life has tidy answers, that our Maker owes us them, that joy will come from some external confirmation or resolution.

This Advent, I’m consciously trading in my highlighter and this theory of tidy recapitulations for something more wholehearted and real—a holy mystery that, it turns out, is far more beautiful.

Waiting for the bloom

Paul Mealor’s “Spotless Rose,” the final movement of a four-part set of madrigals (a genre that usually features an unaccompanied choir), is based on four different texts about roses. “Spotless Rose” sets the Christmas text “Lo, How a Rose,” and meditates on the miracle of the incarnation, through the metaphor of a rose blooming in the winter. Paul Mealor, whom I had the pleasure of meeting in person when I was teaching at the University of Delaware, has taken this fifteenth-century text and written in a style of “spectralism” or what some call “holy minimalism.” This tonal language is lush and angelic, and, to my surprise, not built on my beloved theory of “good” part-writing and Roman numeral harmonic analysis.

Instead, Mealor creates clusters of sounds, focusing on timbre and tone color more than voice-leading. If I tried to use all my old analysis tools to figure out each chord vertically, it wouldn’t always make sense.

What does make sense, to even a listener with no music theory knowledge, is the way the chords bloom. Notes that seemed to not belong in the chord before hold over into the next sound, shimmer with an otherworldliness. Even the dissonance, the notes that do not “go together,” shine with a brightness that is hard to explain. Mealor plants seeds, notes that sustain and build, and then “blossom” into the eight-part divisi (divided) voices across the choir.

See what he did there? The text speaks of Christ, “fairest bud unfolds to light/ amid the cold, cold winter/ And in the dark midnight.” Like a note that seems to make no sense in one chord, a subtle, mysterious resonance waits in the texture to bloom. From chord to chord, like a seed in the frigid ground, the tender root of Jesse, tucked into time, this note, at Christmas, blooms—Christ, the spotless rose.

Put your highlighter down

Maybe you are like me and have spent your life looking for some through line, angry at moments when no analysis tools can answer your asking why. Maybe your faith has been challenged when the music seems to fall off the page into some dissonant cacophony that even a Doctor of Musical Arts could not explain. This lush and beautiful movement, “Spotless Rose,” nudged me gently this week. It reminded me that while full circles are lovely, the God of Christmas is less theorist, more botanist.

We get to believe, even when life feels out of control, that God has already planted seeds in us that our Creator plans to cultivate, to nurture and love into life. We can trust that the leading tones of pain or passion are ways we are being led toward or away from who we are called to be. We may wait, like a note hidden within the texture, unresolved for decades, or in Jesus’ case, millennia, but through him, God with us, we do not wait alone.

God is doing something bigger than you can see now. We want it to make sense. And I believe one day it will, that our longings will be satisfied, our joy will be made complete, that creation will ring with a harmony we’ve never heard, that all will be made well. But, while we wait, this Advent, I’m learning that it will look less like a perfectly designed chord-by-chord analysis and more like watching the ground, trusting in God’s seeds.

If we attempt to find our full circles or temporary peace of mere half-cadences too quickly, we may miss the mysterious musical language of God, the seeds planted that are still yet to bloom, that holy mystery “through God’s great love and might, the spotless rose is blooming in the cold, cold winter night.”

We may not know what our Composer is doing; sometimes that is painful, like a dissonance we long to hear resolved.

I believe it is more beautiful than anything we could ever expect or plan.

Instead of demanding a tidy recapitulation, this Advent invites us to rest in the glorious uncertainty of the divine score, trusting that the mysterious grace of Christ, the Spotless Rose, is already radiating the harmony of a promise kept.

Try it: Unfolding Harmony

As you prepare for the week, I invite you to put on Paul Mealor’s “Spotless Rose” one more time (it’s a short, stunning listen!).

As the beautiful, unresolved chords shimmer around you, take a moment to put down your mental highlighter. What “seeds” might God be tending in you right now that still feel incomplete, mysterious, or even dissonant? We can trust that these nascent gifts and longings, though seemingly hidden in the cold ground of this season, are precisely what our divine Botanist intends to nurture and love into glorious bloom.

Share any thoughts in the comments, I’d love to hear them.

The Advent Songbook will come out in twice-weekly installments to bookend your week. You can subscribe to the Monday Substack emails via the button below and find Friday’s posts on Artists for Joy podcast, via Apple, Spotify, or our website.

For this year’s Art’s Open Door Advent Devotional, “Advent Songbook,” I’ll use my musical expertise to bring rich examples of Christmas art to the forefront. We will pair each piece with a devotional reflection and a practical spiritual posture to shape this season of waiting and wonder.

What to do: take time to listen and/or view the music discussed for each post. When you’re ready, read through the devotional. At the end of the written portion, there will be an invitation: something for you to try or consider in response. Listen again to the music before ending your reflection time.

Does it sound different? How is God speaking to you today through art?

Jot down anything you heard in your journal….or tell us all in the comments!

Subscribe now

“Harp Interlude,” from A Ceremony of Carols by Benjamin Britten

Today’s video features S:t Jacobs Ungdomskör performing Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols in concert at S:t Jacobs Kyrka with conductor Mikael Wedar and harpist Margareta Nilsson. The “Harp Interlude” is movement VII of a larger work. It begins at 12:40. The video should start right on the harp movement when you click the link.

If you are having trouble finding it, or if you’d prefer to hear just the audio, click play below 👇

This 1953 recording features the Copenhagen Boys’ Choir (Mogens Woldike, choirmaster) with Enid Simon on harp, and Benjamin Britten himself conducting. (It is licensed for distribution by Creative Commons.)

Devotional: The things we must do alone

²⁶ In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, ²⁷ to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. ²⁸ The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”

²⁹ Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. ³⁰ But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. ³¹ You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. ³² He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, ³³ and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”

³⁴ “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”

³⁵ The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called^[a] the Son of God. ³⁶ Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. ³⁷ For no word from God will ever fail.”

³⁸ “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.” Then the angel left her. Luke 1: 26-38 (NIV)

The first morning I learned I was “with child,” I woke before my husband. Our bedroom was silent, save for the whir of the ceiling fan. We stood in that most awkward of times in the mid-Atlantic, between spring and summer, when you could find yourself wearing a coat or sweating out a heat wave. This year, it was the latter.

It would be romantic to say that I sensed the life growing in my womb, that this sensation, of some “knowing” that everything was different, woke me from my soundless sleep. But, in reality, the blistering sun shooting through our bedroom’s skylight had roused me. When my eyes opened, I felt exactly the same, if a bit expectant. I was planning to test that day because the fertility app told me to.

It was Pentecost Sunday. In a few hours, we’d be at the church where my husband was pastor. I had already laid out the red skirt I’d bought in Italy on our honeymoon and his cherry red tie. That too-bright, humid morning was the first day when a positive test was possible.

I slipped from the bed, my bare feet weightlessly tip-toed against the cream carpet. I snuck into the bathroom and closed the door silently. The sunlight followed me into the third-floor bathroom, the sky so cloudless and brilliantly blue, otherworldly.

I see friends and strangers on the internet post pictures standing in their bathrooms with their partners, holding the test stick, waiting together. But that morning—I’m not sure why— I wanted to be alone. According to the pregnancy app, there was a good chance it would still be negative anyway; it was so early. Even if it meant wasting a five-dollar pregnancy test, I had to know. I would, of course, wake up Edwin if it was positive.

We had been trying to get pregnant for a few weeks. On the one hand, I felt ready and excited. At 33, I knew I wanted to be a mom, and it felt like the right time. But even as I considered submitting to a very-much-wanted life in my womb, I felt a part of me falling away. I knew if the test were positive, life, up to this moment, would be the before to that morning’s after.

The bright light of joy can take some getting used to.

Maybe not everyone would be, but I wanted to be alone for it.

In the annunciation story in Luke, the moment when Mary finds out she’s pregnant by the Holy Spirit, it doesn’t say that she’s alone. And yet, most artistic renderings depict her that way.

Henry Ossawa Tanner shows her huddled in the corner of her bedroom.

Da Vinci depicts her seated behind a marble table.

Fra Angelico’s shows her on a columned patio.

I believe she was alone (save the angel, of course), not because of tradition, but for the same reasons I wanted to be that morning nearly ten years ago. There are some things we must do alone.

A solo harp

Today’s music, the first of our Advent Songbook series, is a solo harp interlude from a larger work by Benjamin Britten, a beautiful set of carols written for a treble choir and harp, called “A Ceremony of Carols.” In the middle of this joyful and dramatic work, there stands a haunting, three-minute-ish harp solo.

When I heard it for the first time, I pictured Mary alone, working out the grief and fear that almost always trail close behind joy. Verse 29 says, ^“Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be.” Even good news can be troubling at first. What a relief!

The foundation of the entire Harp Interlude is the Gregorian plainsong antiphon, “Hodie Christus natus est” (”Christ is born today”). This melody was first heard in the movement that opens the entire work (”Hodie chorus cantat”). By presenting it again, this time as a solo on the harp, Britten strips it down to its essence, creating a direct, simple re-statement.

The music is a dialogue of two hands.

• Left Hand: Plays the slow, unadorned plainsong melody, representing the simple, ancient truth of the text.

• Right Hand: Plays a syncopated, pulsating accompaniment, often employing arpeggiated figures and a driving rhythmic motive. I hear this as the “processing” or “working out” of the simple reality, adding complexity and a sense of stirring anxiety and contemplation.

While Britten often uses clear tonal centers in the rest of the piece, the Interlude has a modal language, scales reminiscent of Medieval music. He uses parallel perfect fifths and octaves throughout, giving it a hollow, archaic sound. The movement is largely centered around E-flat but constantly shifts mode, creating a feeling of harmonic instability and searching. The frequent clash between the simple left-hand notes and the more complex right-hand harmony creates a sense of profound clarity and mystery all at once.

What moves me most about this music this Advent is how an instrument so sparkly and shimmering, one made for the holiday flourishes of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, suddenly has a depth and sorrow I didn’t expect. The two hands on one instrument, an internal dialogue of solitude, dancing in deep thought, working out the simplest reality, as complex as it is.

There are some things that can only be done alone, even joyful things. This music reminds me that the solitude we need is holy.

The test strip lit up with the faintest double line.

I stared at the pale pink stripe, my heart thrumming against the silence of the room. It was true. I was with child. I put the little stick on the porcelain countertop and sank onto the bathmat. The bright, punishing sun of that Pentecost morning suddenly felt less like a threat and more like an intense, singular compass calling me forward.

The feeling was dazzling, immediate joy, quickly followed by the profound, dizzying weight of the future. The before was over. I sat there in the silence, letting the two parts of the news—the simple, beautiful truth and the complex, syncopated fear—play out their music within me.

I stayed on the floor, breathing. The simple truth and the uncertain reality of the future finally started to harmonize, not perfectly, but in a way that felt like cautious joy.

Only then did I rise to wake Edwin.

There are some things we must do alone.

But here is the more profound truth: we are never really alone. God goes with us, providing the still, quiet, insistent song against our heart’s frantic countermelody. And God doesn’t begrudge us our fear.

Try it:

This Advent, as we look to perceive and understand again, the simple, ancient truth of Jesus’s birth, God with us, I want to invite you to find your own Interlude moment.

Seek out those necessary, quiet moments of solitude—the closed door, the pause in the car, the silence before the household wakes—and allow yourself to be with the complex truths of life right now.

This Advent posture isn’t about isolation; it’s about making space for your own type of annunciation—the moment where the great, complicated news of reality is received, held, and worked out in the immediate, intimate presence of God.

Listen to the music again and jot down what you hear. Share in the comments if you’d like.

The Advent Songbook will come out in twice-weekly installments to bookend your week. You can subscribe to the Monday Substack emails via the button below and find Friday’s posts on Artists for Joy podcast, via Apple, Spotify, or our website.

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As we officially transition out of the “little kid” phase and into a new season of parenting, I’ve been reflecting on what I’ve been learning about faith through motherhood.

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Old Enough

My children are old enough to sleep in beds without rails, but not so old that they don’t run to my room the moment their eyes open.

My daughter’s old enough to sleep through most nights, but not so old that she won’t appear at my bedside at dawn with a pencil, begging to learn her name in cursive.

My son is old enough to make his needs known and be reasoned with (unless he’s tired or hungry), but not too old to shake me awake, demanding my small bedside book light. He points it at his stuffed turtle and says, “Say ahh!” like a good doctor.

As we all lie there in the big bed together, their father—my love—and I flank them like bookends. The grey light of the October morning creeps slowly around the curtain’s corners. I sigh. That familiar cocktail of feelings rushes in: exhausted joy chased with guilt. My need for them, the weight of their need for me, sits like two fifty-pound school children, squarely on my chest.

When my daughter wasn’t old enough to hold her head up or sleep anywhere but my arms, I had a recurring nightmare. I’d dozed off rocking her; she was trapped in the blankets. The first time I felt the maternal instinct take over so completely, I woke up digging like some desperate creature. She slept soundly in her bassinet. The room was still, the white noise roared.

Can a woman forget her nursing child,
or show no compassion for the child of her womb?
Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.1

These words from the book of Isaiah: the heaviness, the literal leaking of love, the lonely, vulnerable, bloody, animal life of a mother. This, too, is God’s image?

I have known what it is to come to the end of my remembering. The whoosh of their heartbeats on the sonogram still sings in my empty womb, their DNA still swims in my bloodstream. I’ve found a seven-pound body impossibly heavy to hold.

All this time, I’d been tempted to picture God as a flawed, human father, detached and stern; or a human mother, waiting for me to be old enough to take care of myself. Like God longed for her body back, to finally wean me, that there was a limit to her and I had reached it.

Now, in our family bed, I count the vertebrae of my son’s spine. I smell my daughter’s head. I run my fingers along my two-time C-section scar. I let myself need God like I need them, like they need me, in total dependence, access only a child can have.

Once, my son, after a long day at school, protested sleep because he hadn’t “put his eyes on me enough that day.”

These children, so unashamed of their need for their mother—this longing, the only thing they’re sure of.

That October morning, I let myself love God like a mother.

Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.

I brought to God my unreasonable, tired, and hungry heart. I woke the One who never slumbers or sleeps with the most frivolous request. In the collapse of my children’s bodies against mine, I released to God the full weight of my belonging.

I’m practicing running to God as soon as my eyes open.

When I find myself begrudging the cursive lessons or the 3 AM snuggles, I look around at the hard and the holy.

God is there, at my bedside, in the mess, before I call, mothering me.

It was God who helped this mother remember: there is no such thing as “old enough.”

We never stop needing the One who loved us into being.

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Thanks for reading. I’m so glad you’re here.

<3,

Merideth