Confessions from the Last Week

For when you feel like quitting

In the last week, I have imagined flying to Paris and buying an apartment like Ina and Jeffery¹. And we could walk to the Boulevard Raspail market to buy tomatoes and find a café crème and a tartine with good butter and raspberry jam for breakfast.

The 1913 Boscawen Library is for sale. Photo: Katie Phelps

In the last week, I’ve imagined buying this 1913 library in New Hampshire² because of the dark wood and large windows and the charm of living in a library.

I’ve thought about going on pilgrimage with a group of interesting and diverse people, having conversations that matter in memorable places, eating comfort food and taking good notes.

I’ve daydreamed about an beautiful room in a fictional town and staying there all alone, surrounded by books and notebooks and warm light and soft blankets and a lot of sacred time, like Three Pines but without all the murder³.

I’ve imagined clearing my whole schedule and quitting every job I have in order to go back to school again, not because I want a credential but because the commitment would force me into a deep work kind of study that I often crave.

All of this has happened in my imagination over the last week without any amount of effort. Am I looking for some kind of way out? A time out? A home base? A pass? A distraction? A change? An excuse? Or maybe this is just what we do.

Yesterday I told a friend I deeply respect who has been writing in the spiritual formation space for many decades, “Sometimes I just want to be done. I mean I’m not done, but sometimes I imagine quitting the ‘writing and doing things in public’ part of my life and just staying home and making dinner and sitting on my sofa.”

His response?

“Me too.”

In the last week, I’ve imagined indulging, exploring, escaping, diving all the way in and checking all the way out because sometimes to face what is right in front of you feels too hard and too big and too complex. And all you want is for someone grown to step up beside you, wrap you in a blanket, hand you a bowl of soup and maybe a cookie, and tell you everything is going to be okay.

I guess I’m writing down these half-thoughts and whimsical imaginations because it’s an understandable response in the face of a daunting reality to want to find a way around it. Feeling like you want to be done, sit all the way down, and quit once and for all isn’t a shame, a verdict, or a flaw. It’s a feature. This is what it means to be a human person.

But this is not all it means.

Because something else I’ve done in the last week is I’ve imagined the face of my friend Jesus, looking for signs of panic on his face, trying to discern where his freak out is, waving to get his full attention.

In my earnest search for the face of Christ, I’m aware I need not wave my arms so much. He embodies a reciprocal action — one where he is earnest in his turning toward me.

After several weeks of exhaustion, discouragement, travel, and wondering what might be next, I have found a fair amount of comfort in taking some giant steps backward to see a larger picture (and to be seen by One). Because there are not only two dimensions of being human - ourselves and our circumstance. We know this.

There are, as submitted by James Loder and expounded on by Dr. Esther Lightcap Meek, four dimensions of humanness. In addition to ourselves and our circumstance, there is also the Void (an awareness that comes unbidden the worst could happen and maybe we want to do everything we can to escape it) and the Holy (“the gracious possibility of new being”).⁴

“We begin to move from deep hurt and need, choosing to move beyond shutting down, to reach out beyond ourselves, to the possibility of new being, and invite its gracious involvement.”

—The Little Manual for Knowing, p. 36

Inviting the gracious involvement of God sometimes looks like being all the way honest about how I wish I could somehow find a shortcut around the valley of the shadow of death. It also means knowing that if there isn’t one, there’s literally no way in hell God will allow us to walk through that valley alone.

Have you had any ulterior reality daydreams in the last week? What is getting you through?

As always, I’m glad you’re here. If you want to subscribe and support my work, it would mean a lot to me. I always hope in sharing a bit of my own faith journey that it might help you to articulate your own. And no, I don’t plan to quit. I just daydream about it sometimes.

1. She tells the story of buying a Paris apartment in her new memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens.

2. Cheap Old Houses has a video tour and here is more information about it incase YOU want to buy it!

3. If you haven’t heard of Three Pines, it’s the fictional town where the Chief Inspector Gamache novels takes place, a series of books by author Louise Penny.

4. Taken from A Little Manual for Knowing by Dr. Esther Lightcap Meek. Her delightful teaching refutes the common presumption that “knowing” involves simply amassing information. She calls herself an exuberant realist, a term she made up and fully embodies. I had the honor of eating a meal with her last night which is what inspired some of these dreamy thoughts and philosophical musings.