No. 008: Why I Write.
(And why I invite you to read.)
Hi dear neighbors,
I am currently drafting some work that is not destined for Substack, but I didn’t want you to think that I had jumped ship if a bit more time passes before the addition of any new long-form contributions here.
But since you have been gracious enough to read my initial smattering of posts, I figured that now would be a fitting time to expound upon the goal statement I have articulated on my About page in order more fully to answer the question: Why do I write? You have generously sacrificed your time to engage with my words, so I suppose you deserve to know why I have written them in the first place.
The internet is awash with hot takes, and there are innumerable writers asking for your attention. So why do I think I’m special?
Well, first of all, I absolutely don’t think I’m special. I believe that I am very much like you and that you are very much like me, which is why I frequently refer to you as my brothers, sisters, and neighbors. I write with an open invitation for you to share your thoughts with me so that we might walk hand-in-hand on a path of curious and humble discipleship.
My desire to write is, I will admit, at least partially selfish.
Perhaps this will surprise you, but I am one of the subset of people who do not primarily think in words. I do not have an “inner voice,” so if out-of-the-blue you ask me vaguely, “What are you thinking about?” I will likely struggle to answer (and might become irritated in the process). My inner world, rather, typically operates on intuitions, images, and emotions.
Writing is and always has been one of the most helpful exercises, if not the most helpful exercise, that allows me to organize the intuitions, images, and emotions floating around my mind into some semblance of a logical structure. Writing is how I learn.
I have titled my Substack “I’m Still Learning” because learning really is my principal objective here. To be completely honest with you, whenever I write a new piece, I begin with only a question in my mind, and I do not know exactly what the answer will be until I have finished the piece. In other words, I do not write in order to teach you something I already know; I write so that we might both learn together.
Learning is my goal, but the best motivator for any goal is passion, and there are several passions that influence my writing.
In my life, I have at times occupied a station of Strength and at other times (in more recent years, due to a seven-year battle with debilitating, treatment-resistant depression) occupied a station of Weakness.
Life in a station of Weakness did not look or feel at all like what the Strong once told me it would look and feel like. I did not end up in a station of Weakness for the reasons that the Strong had told me were the only reasons a person could end up there, nor did I find freedom from the turmoil of Weakness via the strategies preached by the Strong. When I was at my Weakest, I made friends with others who were Weak, and, again, they were nothing like what the Strong had said they would be like. Were they “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matt. 9:36)? Yes. But were they lazy, foolish, or unusually selfish? No. To the contrary, they were honorable.
Therefore I am deeply passionate about giving a voice to those who are Weak—to advocate for them and to implore the Strong to honor them with dignity.
The Evangelical church in America has for decades occupied a station of Strength within our broader culture. (I know some of us like to indulge in the occasional persecution complex, but let’s be real now...) From this station of Strength we have enjoyed abundant blessings of relative safety, influence, and liberty.
This is not inherently a bad thing, but when we grow comfortable enjoying the blessings of Strength, we will be tempted to prioritize self-preservation over other Christian imperatives.
There are numerous areas where I see this anxious self-preservation at work in the Evangelical church, wherein we apply the gospel primarily to augment our spiritual comfort and to justify our Strength, rather than to embrace our call to sacrificial obedience. It’s not quite the same as the good ol’ Moralistic Therapeutic Deism from back in the day, but it is perhaps MTD’s baptized cousin.
The Evangelical church feeds its men books on the principles of Christian wisdom that will bolster their personal success and self-confidence (How Emulating King David Can Help You Lead Your Business Effectively!), and it feeds its women books on how to invite Jesus to calm their emotional storms (How Praying the Word “Selah” Can Cure Your Anxiety!—and don’t forget the obligatory watercolor peonies on the cover).
I see a number of problems with this literary ethos:1
In this ethos, the gospel takes on an air of sentimentality, replete with pithy aphorisms and platitudes. When you are Strong, sentimental platitudes may taste sweet, but when you are Weak, they strike as poisonous mockery. I am passionate about tearing down such platitudes so that the true light of the gospel may shine more clearly.
This ethos underestimates the intelligence of its readers, especially women, which often leads them to doubt and devalue their own intelligence and influence.
Such writings tend to prioritize the spiritual over the material, divorcing their considerations of the soul from any consideration of what it means for God deliberately to have designed us as embodied creatures. But we are bid to follow a resurrected Christ, not the ghost of Plato, and the consequences of this divorce are myriad. While I will not address any here, I will at least say, insofar as it concerns why I write, that many of my projects seek to reunite what in specific contexts has been torn apart.
Although, as I have previously acknowledged, Evangelicalism has witnessed a shift (fueled largely by Instagram) toward an appreciation of the beauty of God’s good material creation, I am concerned that this shift at times endorses enjoyment at the expense of mercy and compassion, that it breeds an air of self-righteousness, and that it presents discipleship as just another product or experience that you can buy. I am equally committed to correcting these temptations to oversteer.
Many contemporary Evangelical writings either spiritualize or outright ignore the clear teachings of Christ that the gospel is good news primarily for the Weak—the hungry, the poor, the prisoner, the disabled, and the oppressed (Luke 1:53; 4:18)—and, therefore, that the gospel is most likely to spread when churches and their members roll up their sleeves, immerse their whole selves into communities of the Weak, and embrace self-abasing lives of embodied mercy and compassion (see, e.g., Matt. 19:16–30; 25:31–46; John 13:1–17; 15:13; Acts 2:43–47; 1 Cor. 9:19–23; Phil. 2:1–4; Heb. 13:15–16; James 1:27; 1 John 3:16–17; etc.).
I thoroughly understand—because I have been there too—that when you read such verses from the comfortable station of Strength, they can feel more like threats than they feel like encouragements. We know that the gospel first and foremost is supposed to be message of encouragement, not condemnation, and this is why we are quick either to spiritualize such verses or to excuse ourselves from them with a permission slip of “grace.” But if we do so, we are missing out.
Why? Because—while the “gospel” of Strength does offer an immediate sense of comfort—over the long-run it ensnares us further into the chains of the very thing from which the gospel is supposed to free us—that is, our selves. The yoke of Christ is easy and the burden of Christ is light (Matt. 11:30), but this is the yoke and the burden of Christ: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Matt. 16:24).
The gospel declares that there is life abundant (John 10:10) to be found when the disciple of Christ dies to herself in real, embodied ways in order to demonstrate her love of God by actively loving her neighbor (Luke 10:25–37). The wisdom of the gospel is foolishness and a stumbling-block to the world (1 Cor. 1:23), but grace opens the eyes of the Christian to receive this wisdom as hidden treasure (Matt. 13:44).
I will never admonish you to give of yourself to serve your neighbor so that you might become a “better Christian.” I will only encourage you to do so, because the path to sustainable peace and joy is found by walking in embodied solidarity with the crucified Christ and those he came to save—the sick and the sinner (Matt. 9:12–13).
Those who know me in “real life” can attest that I am certainly no Mother Theresa, and it would be useless (and deceptive) for me to defend some claim that I have thoroughly and perfectly put what I preach here into practice.
But this does bring me back to the question of why I write.
First, I am a stay-at-home mom, and as a stay-at-home mom, I don’t have (or at least I don’t seem to have) much “power” or “influence” within the broader world. I do believe that Christ honors the thankless and unrecognized work of stay-at-home parents, and I would never broadly admonish stay-at-home parents that they need to push themselves to do more in order to “earn” their value as disciples of Christ.
However, at least personally, my “powerlessness” can sometimes feel like a self-serving comfort: I suppose that no one is really expecting me to do anything beyond my “mom duties,” so I am therefore allowed to divert whatever extra energy and time I can contrive toward “self-care.”
But as I mentioned previously, my life experiences have left me with a passion to advocate for the Weak. When I survey the tools at my disposal, I may not have a “sword,” but I do have a pen, and if I can use that little tool of might to encourage my neighbor, then I will receive that opportunity as a gift.
Second, writing actively transforms my mind, and it holds me accountable to what I have learned. Perhaps my life does not look like that of a Desert Father, but the questions I have worked through via writing have led me to answers that have made a real difference in healing my material covetousness and over-consumption, and I consistently feel so much happier because of it. (I do not say that to boast in myself, but only to boast in the transformative power of the gospel.) I do not intend my writing to serve as a stick of condemnation, but as a carrot of grace. Following that carrot has for me been a movement toward freedom, and I pray that it will be for you too.
The final passion that shapes my writing is the promotion of embodied participation within the local and global church.
In my Evangelical circles, we put a lot of stress on the Bible. And I’m so glad that we do! The Bible is God’s benevolent Word to his image-bearers, and it is the world’s only written source of normative truth, for which we are in desperate need in this current age of confusion and discord.
What worries me, though, is that Christians sometimes interpret the “sufficiency of Scripture” to mean that as long as they are consistently reading Scripture (and maybe a few expository commentaries), then they should expect to enjoy fulfilling and peaceful spiritual lives.
This is merely a sanctified version of the individualistic teachings of our culture at large, and it will never satisfy.
The active ministry of the Holy Spirit is primarily at work within the body of Christ, which is the church. The health of each local body will always depend on its adherence to Scripture, yes, but individual Christians are called to find their sense of identity and purpose not as independent bodies, but as members of the one body (Rom. 12:3–8; 1 Cor. 12:12–27).
This message has been driven home for me in the past several years. When I was at my Weakest, I worked to nurture my soul via independent meditations on Scripture, and this discipline certainly didn’t hurt anything. But above all else, it was the love, the encouragement, the patience, and the compassion of my sisters and brothers in Christ that saw me through day-to-day. Even when I was Weak, the church offered me opportunities to give of myself to serve the body and to love my sisters and brothers, and—contrary to what worldly logic might expect—it was through these exercises of self-sacrificial love that I actually found my heart filled and healed.
The mission of the church is not simply to distribute Bibles, although this can certainly be a worthwhile first step. Our ultimate mission is to invite those who are lost and hurting into our body of loving fellowship so that together we may exalt Christ and spur one another on in hope and perseverance until our final days.
Because I intend the work I do on Substack to serve my own edification just as much as I intend it to serve my readers, I am—at least for now—committed to keeping my Substack paywall-free. (That’s not a judgment on writers who do use a paywall, but I know that subscription costs add up quickly if you are following multiple writers, so I am happy to be at least one writer whose work you can access for free.)
However, if you value my writing, it would mean the world and a half to me if you would be willing (1) to subscribe, and (2) to share my work with anyone you believe might also enjoy it—whether through the Substack app, through email, through Instagram, or through any other channel. I truly do not care on a personal level about my subscriber or follower counts, and I feel somewhat embarrassed attempting to market myself in this way. However, there is a project that I have completed that I care passionately about sharing with the world, but given the legitimate desire of publishers to turn a profit, it is unlikely ever to become materialized unless publishers have good reason to believe that my work will have a captive audience. If you have so far enjoyed my work and would be at all interested in reading more, then I humbly request that you:
It is a privilege to pray for you, my readers, and I thank you sincerely for inviting my words into your minds. I look forward in joy and hope to all that we might learn together.
Until next time—
Affectionate thanks,
HLS
To be clear, I am in no way arguing that I am the only contemporary Evangelical writer who has identified these problems and “risen above” them, and I actually just laughed out loud at the thought. (Consider Bri Strensrud, Lore Ferguson Wilbert, and Alan Noble as just three examples of the hundreds [thousands?] of Evangelical writers whose work breaks past the easy endorsements of self-preservation and sentimentality.) I also by no means am trying to condemn the writers of such books as I am describing as “bad Christians” or “false teachers.” I will rejoice anytime a book or a blog causes its readers to praise Christ and find their needs met in him. I would only submit that such resources are little more like “milk” and a little less like “solid food” (1 Cor. 3:2).