Mark Labberton: I’m really delighted that today I have the opportunity to talk with Tish Harrison Warren. She’s a woman that I’ve admired a great deal for many years as a writer and as an Anglican priest. She’s written several significant and award-winning books. One is Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life, and Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep. Both were award-winning books and are very valuable. And today’s book, very much in line with them, is called What Grows in Weary Lands: On Christian Resilience. We’re going to have an opportunity to explore with her what that book is about and the call for resilience at a time when the church needs all the resilience it can get.
She currently serves as the C.S. Lewis Theological Writer-in-Residence for the Anglican Episcopal House of Studies at Baylor’s Seminary, and she’s a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum and an assisting priest at Emmanuel Anglican Church in Austin, Texas. Tish, welcome to Conversing.
Tish Harrison Warren: Yeah, it’s really fun to be with you. You know, I’ve been part of the cheerleading squad for your writing for many years. I’ve benefited from it deeply. I’ve followed your column as you were writing it in the New York Times. And I’ve had all kinds of curiosities. I hope one day we’ll actually have an opportunity to meet in person. But today is the closest I’ve gotten. And I’m just really thankful for your willingness to have this conversation together.
Mark Labberton: You’ve written this new book that is just launching. And I’m so delighted to have read it and been fed and nurtured, challenged by it in many different ways. It’s entitled, again, What Grows in Weary Lands: On Christian Resilience. What led you to start writing this book?
Tish Harrison Warren: So I would say the season that I wrote for The Times, and after that — so pretty much the whole time I was there and after — I was struggling a lot with feeling exhausted. Some of this was just the stage of life. I had young kids and I had a mom who has dementia and Alzheimer’s. And so I’m in the sandwich generation, right? Sandwiched between ageing parents and still kids at home. And young kids. I had a baby at 40, so we had a little tiny guy, and then two elementary-age and teenage girls.
So there was that, but it was deeper than that. It was a kind of spiritual malaise. I was struggling with doubt in a way that I hadn’t before. Prayer felt really hard. It felt like I was going to prayer after there had been a season of real fruitfulness, of real beauty — and then it felt like, as I told my husband, the line went dead. It felt like God was hard, hard to find. And I had a lot of work, working at The Times. Before then, I was busy. I had a lot of — I was struggling a lot with anxiety, but it did not feel like I was in a spacious place or a fruitful place. I wasn’t depressed and I wasn’t undergoing great grief or tragedy. My kids were okay. I was okay. Things were all right, but I felt like life was hard. And then I was kind of muddling through, putting one foot in front of the other for a long time. And I mean that creatively and spiritually as well.
Mark Labberton: I think early in the book you set out some of the things that were part of this season you’re describing, and part of the journey that you were on in your own discovery, reflection, and ultimately in the writing you’ve done in this book that captures some of the reasons why you were drawn to this issue of resilience — your own fatigue and exhaustion and the malaise that you describe. I wonder if you could just take a few moments to read some of those early paragraphs or sections of the book, which really opens with a chapter that defines in many ways the why of your writing. Give us a reading if you would please, and then we’ll jump off from there.
Tish Harrison Warren: Okay. I’m going to give a short reading. Really all of chapter one is about this. It’s about the widespread burnout that I experienced in our culture, the idea of languishing that got a lot of popularity during the pandemic and right afterwards. And so there’s a long introduction to this idea of weariness, and then I’ll pick up in the middle of it.
What I found is that the holiest people in Christianity’s history, across time and cultures, have returned again and again to a common question: How do I keep going? Our older brothers and sisters, those who’ve gone before us, were not always full of ardor, and God often felt distant. In life and in faith, they were not always sure what to do or how to go on. They failed, they flailed, they doubted, they felt like giving up. Yet they found a way through to flourishing, to hope, to abundance. And they left a record for us of what they discovered.
I’m going to skip a little part here — the book is largely about voices from Christian history who wrote honestly about languishing, about the middle section of faith, more than I think we talk about now, particularly in the American church. So I’ll keep going.
Revivalism has warped religious faith in America, perhaps especially in the peculiar and diverse movement called evangelicalism. The point of revivalism is to get people to walk the aisle, to make a decision for Christ. It’s why we love conversion stories and emotional responses to God. We are rightly moved when we hear about how people were once lost and now are found. These are great stories. Lately, there’s also an increasing popularity of deconversion stories. These are accounts of people seeing the light and leaving the faith in one way or another. They shed, for instance, their fundamentalist past for progressive politics or a pastiche of spiritualities or a contented agnosticism. What our culture and what the church tends to lack are stories of a long, steady continuation in faith. We revel in newness and youthful passion. We might even occasionally laud the wisdom of years — the sages, the gurus, the living legends. But we don’t have categories for the prolonged middle, for the slog, especially if the slog is accompanied by the feeling of abandonment by or distance from God.
Here’s the thing, though. We can’t get from newfound ardor to tried and tested wisdom without the winding middle. This book is about the perseverance it takes not just to endure, but to embrace the middle. It’s about what the Christian tradition often called fortitude, but we now more commonly name resilience. Perseverance and resilience are unsung virtues, not nearly as splashy as courage or justice. They can seem tired or uninteresting — the “eat your vegetables” of the spiritual life. But I have come to believe that perseverance is the most vital quality in a lifetime of discipleship, that grit is an essential ingredient of grace, and that resilience is indispensable if we are to become who we are made to be. What I need and what I long for are stories of reconversion — of coming back to Jesus day by day over a lifetime, of being lost and found and lost and found again and again. I want to learn from those who have slowly discovered the long way to what lasts.
Mark Labberton: Your writing is really exceptional. And I do think you put your finger on something that is very profound. And it’s part of the reason that I found the book so compelling to read. It’s also partly that having been a pastor for over forty years and having walked with so many people in the middle season, I’m aware that as a pastor, you get a close view of what you’re writing about — because you’re walking with people in mostly middle. Middle earth, if you want to use that phrase. The middle earth of ordinary-sized objects and people and circumstances in all of their glory and struggle and pain and challenge and beauty and wonder. And it’s the close-in opportunity to see and know how that unfolds that I kept finding myself thinking about again and again as I was reading the book, because I know so many saints who are exemplars of the kind of persistence and resilience that you’re describing, and that willingness, in a way, to come to faith again and again. It’s a really wonderful and apt description.
I wonder — as you were going through that season, and perhaps are still in part in it, since it never seems to truly fully leave us — when you were finished writing this book, what did it feel like you had experienced in your own journey?
Tish Harrison Warren: I wrote this book because I needed to figure out how to keep going. In my own life. And I kind of feel like I did. Not that I’m not in the middle anymore — I very much am. And this is a very sort of midlife, mid-faith kind of book. But there were some things that were really key for me.
First of all, to know that a sense of God’s distance is not necessarily a sign that you are doing something wrong, or that you need to gin up some level of faith — that this is seen as a really normal and important part of Christian maturation in the faith. That was important to me.
I think rediscovering the practice of stability — not as just something that monks do, but as something that is for all of us, and that we need — was also crucial. Stabilitas Cordis: Stability of the Heart. That’s language I actually had not been exposed to until I wrote this book. But I think it was very, very helpful for me.
There is a narrative in culture that I have imbibed a lot, where women get to my age — kind of mid-forties — and they’re overwhelmed and they’re tired, and marriage is hard and life is hard and faith is hard. And the idea is kind of: blow up your life and start again. Go eat, pray, love. Leave. Deconstruct your faith, maybe leave your spouse. Maybe even if it’s not that, it’s kind of like reinvent yourself one way or another. And I needed some option that didn’t feel like just muddle through and live a consumeristic life and get your kids off to college and be a suburban consumer, living in quiet desperation. Or blow up your life and reinvent yourself — go to Tibet or Paris and start anew.
I needed some other option that felt meaningful and deep and rich and rooted. And so this idea of stability itself being a practice — that our practice isn’t just prayer or worship, but the continuation of those things and the continuation of community — I just feel like stability is such an important practice, but it’s not talked about a lot unless you happen to be a Benedictine monk. And so that was really helpful for me.
And then I think the result of those things — of stability in my own life — has just been to see how much I’m a striver, how much I sort of want to seek God, live the Christian life, take up practices of prayer, whatever, remain faithful to my children and husband. And some of that is out of good impulses. But there’s almost a sense of, Hey, God, I’m putting my effort in and you have to show up with a particular result. God becomes kind of like an app — like an Uber driver. And it was difficult for me to see that in my own life, because that doesn’t look like the typical prosperity gospel. I don’t — I’ve been through enough and I’ve been theologically educated enough to know that it’s not like I pray and get a check in the mail, or that my kids are promised to be healthy, or any of that. But I basically kind of expected a sense of spiritual fulfilment, or creative fulfilment, or a success — perhaps not the way the world defines success, but success the way I define success. And then even that is a kind of striving that God is inviting me away from, into the sufficiency of God alone.
And that almost sounds trite because we’ve heard it since — well, if you’re a Christian, you’ve heard that a long time. But it showed me how much I come to God wanting to consume God as a consumer product, and not as a sort of unpredictable, uncontrollable God who loves me regardless of whether prayer feels fruitful, regardless of whether I’m doing great in the prayer life or not.
So yes — rediscovering stability was huge for me. But also rediscovering grace in the midst of that, that there’s a call to be still, a call to cease striving, that I have to learn to take up in a deeper way.
Mark Labberton: In the opening chapter, you talk about this metaphor and non-metaphor: stay in your cell. I wonder if you could take us into the desert fathers and mothers for a moment and give us a bearing on that, because it concretizes what you’re just saying — the sense of location, place, in the deepest sense. Tell us what that means and why you began your book there.
Tish Harrison Warren: So the desert mothers and fathers, for listeners who may not know, are third- through fifth-century men and women who went and literally lived out in the desert. And when you read their writings — I was just looking at some of their sayings this morning — again and again you hear this call: stay in your cell. To go, and to return to your cell if you have left. For them, that was a call to continue in the life of a monk, to continue in the rhythms and habits of prayer. The cell was literally the place that a monk lived and prayed and worked. It involved all of that — it was not just a place of prayer. It was a place of work. It was a place of life. And so it was literally a small room or a hut or a cave.
But more broadly, it meant to stay in the life of a monk, to not go back to the city or the life you had before, but to stay in the rhythms of prayer and habits of a monk, to continue on the spiritual quest, and to stay with a particular community — to actually remain in the community you’re in. There were all kinds of reasons that monks were tempted to leave their cell. A huge one was just distraction and boredom — it got boring, and they wanted something more fun. But also there were stories of people being overwhelmed by their sin and feeling like God isn’t taking temptation out of my life. I’ve been praying that God would remove me from temptation and I’m still full of anger. And so they would leave their cell, essentially saying, I’m not good enough to be a monk. And these elders would say: just return to your cell. It is not your own effort — it’s God’s mercy. Or monks would have nostalgia and fantasy — Oh, if I were somewhere else, God would use me more. I could be more holy. And so there was this constant call to just remain where you are, in the place you’re at, with the people you’re at, even in the midst of the incompleteness and struggle of that.
It was a call not to give up, to keep struggling. And you see it constantly. It’s hard to overstate how often this comes up in the writings. And I hadn’t heard that before, not in that way. I had read some desert mothers and fathers, but the notion of staying in your cell seemed so much more holistic to me than the evangelical “keep at your quiet time” kind of advice. It was a call to even stay in the ordinary work of your life, the ordinary relationships of your life, the community you were in — even to remain with God in places where you’ve been disappointed by God. So it’s this holistic call, which Benedict then picks up and makes a vow of stability — but he’s really drawing from this idea of staying in yourself.
Mark Labberton: Staying is like the last thing that our culture tends to feed. We’re constantly fed: move, change, alter, upset, reorient — as opposed to this language of staying.
I remember by the time I graduated from high school — I wasn’t a Christian, that wasn’t the world I was even interested in — I was interested in finding what “the peaceful life” meant. And I started reading, interestingly, some of the desert mothers and fathers with no clue what I was really reading. I was just reading this literature that had come to my attention. And what struck me was that they had come into this isolation — as one might have expected naively, as I was at eighteen — expecting that somehow this would be a place of solace and quiet and peace. Whereas when I read the journals and the reflections on their lives, it was this extraordinary journey of turbulence and challenge, because it brought them face to face with their own personal crises, and the issues of the world, of God, of human nature, and so forth.
And what I realized — though I had no bearings for understanding really what this meant — was that it all turned for them on something to do with God, and on a God who was present in all of that turbulence. So I understood my own turbulence — that was pretty clear to me. But what I didn’t understand was this call to a person, Jesus, who actually was the turning point around which all of this other turbulence somehow found its resolution. But it was about a facing of the raw realities of people’s lives — the unexpectedness, the pain, the suffering, the sin, all of that. And it was ultimately then through reading the Gospels that I came to faith in Christ, because I could see that there was something on offer that completely eluded me and which I had not ever experienced before. It was this profound centre.
So when I was reading your book, one of the things I was doing was going back through those memories — years now, decades ago — when, to my shock (which it still is — it is still truly shocking to me that I’m a Christian), I had this discovery of, in a way, staying in your cell. It was not an invitation to abandon the life that I was living, but to actually recentre it and give myself to it even more significantly. So at eighteen or nineteen, that was —
Tish Harrison Warren: That would be good in the book. That’s kind of the point.
Mark Labberton: That was a huge pivot. It was like: so this is the reality out of which all other reality is meant to somehow find its home. It was clear to me that Jesus was not an escape artist, that he was not leading us toward an escapist life. And that’s always been, in a way, the grittier part of the journey of faith.
And I think part of why — to my great surprise, again total disorienting shock — I became a pastor was: Oh. This is actually what all of that was about. Now I’m with people in their cells. And we are in a common cell called a community of faith, but we are also in our individual cells, and the two constantly interact. But the rawness, the utter unfinishedness of it, was what drew me to pastoral ministry — and is probably the part about no longer serving actively in that kind of role that I miss the most. It’s being in the mess with people who are wherever we all are.
And certainly at a moment like this, when the American church, in my view, is facing so many self-created tragedies and nightmares of our own spiritual, theological, and political making — lots of mess. And that is just a gigantic mess. So what does it mean to know and find and live out of Christ in that mess, which is the long middle that we’re now all in together, in the United States and certainly for churches around the world as well?
Tish Harrison Warren: Yeah, that’s right. Everything you said — I just endorse and think. I just wish I could put it all in the book.
But I think what we’re kind of sold in the culture is that if you make the right choices, work hard, marry the right person, get the right job, that you eventually get out of the struggle — that life becomes more frictionless. And the discovery, reading these desert fathers and mothers, is that you never get to a place of pacific calmness. The struggle is just always there. And that doesn’t mean that there isn’t peace or joy — it’s just never a peace or joy devoid of struggle. It’s a peace and joy that’s all part and parcel and wrapped up in the struggle.
I kept expecting to get past the struggle. And I think part of this book is me realizing: that doesn’t happen. There’s not a time when that’s over. If we sort of do the right things, we get past the struggle — that’s a lie. You do experience gladness and delight and joy and fullness. But it’s always right there with the mess, right there with the struggle. Beginning to end of the Christian life, really until Jesus comes and makes things right, there’s always this incompleteness.
And that doesn’t mean that’s easy. I think there’s always a sadness and disappointment about that incompleteness. But I think we meet God there. We meet God in the midst of that, not on the other side of it.
Mark Labberton: Right, right, right. And I think that’s asking a lot from people who have dramatically different expectations — that faith is a form of getting it all right, having it all right, and then living it all right. So then anything that tyrannizes that, whether it’s personal pain or social injustice or racial issues or gendered issues or whatever it may be, becomes something that needs to be kept out in order to maintain peace. And a lot of the weakness of the American church right now is a tendency — pervasively in so many places, it seems — to fence out the turbulence. As though somehow: A, we can do that, and B, that that would be a Christian thing to do.
Whereas based on the kind of writing that you’ve done, period, and in this book, you present a vision of the Christian life that is really about living into the turbulence — because it is the raw stuff in which we live — but finding in that turbulence a God who never lets go, and who is present with us. Not always as present and not always as resolving as we would wish, but nevertheless present.
This is why, as I was reading this book, I kept thinking of a subject that I’ve spent a lot of time on over the years: whether the American church should really understand itself as a church in exile. Not just the American church — the church period, all around the world, often a dramatic minority population facing enormous challenges. But inside the United States, because we have this national narrative around a promised land — which is really the language of empire, distorted by our own politics and expectations — rather than living as strangers in a strange land, trying to figure out what faithfulness means when so much doesn’t fit and when we don’t have the full resolutions that we would have wished for. Does that resonate with your sense of what you’re writing in this book?
Tish Harrison Warren: Yeah. I don’t read a ton about political theology or the church in exile — although I think that framing is really helpful, and in some ways it is my approach to life. It’s honestly part of what makes it very hard at this moment to be a Christian writer and an evangelical writer. Because I have never felt — well, I don’t want to say “never.” Since I was a teenager, I’ve never felt like the church was an entity that demanded cultural respect or was at home in the mainstream. I grew up in Austin, which is a very blue city. And I spent a lot of time on the Drag, which is right by UT’s campus — full of everyone. Cowboys and hippies, lots of unhoused people, pagans, all kinds of things. And I just never thought that what I believed was normal or mainstream or any kind of social boon. It just made me weird.
So I never experienced Christianity as a majority faith, even though I grew up in Texas. And then of course, as I actually encountered more of the teaching of scripture — around things like radical generosity to the poor, and forgiveness of enemies — this never seemed like it fit into America to me. And yet I also never just went wholesale social gospel. I never really bought into — and I’m actually writing a piece on this right now — but if the Moral Majority was kind of dressing Jesus up and putting him in a red tie, it didn’t seem like a solution to then just put Jesus in a blue tie. So I’ve always thought that we were in exile.
But even if, let’s say, one’s vision of the kingdom coming is whatever — dismantling capitalism and having a socialist state, or the opposite, going back to 1950s American conservatism — first of all, neither of those options sound super awesome to me, but it also feels like our primary exile isn’t a political state. It’s that we’re in sin. I mean, I think even if all the candidates I wanted got elected, the people who are struggling in my church — it’s not that politics doesn’t affect them, but the deepest struggles in their lives are pain of broken relationships, pain of addiction, pain of self-righteousness, pain of children estranged from them. It just feels so much more pervasive than what any policy or polity could solve. So I don’t know. I think my sense of exile is pretty profound. But I never really thought politics could solve it.
Mark Labberton: I agree with you entirely — it’s not a political solution. But even Israel experienced exile in part as a political problem. The work of exile was always: If I take away all the signs of your evident blessing, now what does it mean to be faithful as a stranger in a strange land? You end up with entirely different questions and a different kind of formation — not built out of the presumption of blessing, but out of utter dependency on a God who meets us in the cell you’re referring to so much throughout your book.
I think that’s part of why this book speaks significantly, and I hope it finds an audience of people who are hungry for what to do in that cell — something constructive in the building of a long discipleship. A discipleship, as you describe, that grows in a weary land and that requires resilience.
Tell a story, if you would, from your pastoral experience — a person you may have known well, someone in your congregation — who you would, not necessarily publicly but that you would internally, think of as an exemplar of this long road of resilience that you’re describing.
Tish Harrison Warren: That’s a great question. I think I have several. I’ll just tell you the first person who came to mind. I haven’t mapped this out as the exemplar — so I’m just going to name one person because it was literally the first person that popped to mind: my friend Charlie.
Charlie is at the former church I served in Pittsburgh. He is in his mid-seventies and he is just profoundly joyful in a way that I currently do not experience. And some of this one could say is just Charlie — his personality — which maybe is true. Except that he tells a story of having grown up in a rough place, in a hard house to grow up in, in a hard neighbourhood. And he would say — and I hope it’s okay, Charlie, that I’m sharing this — that he was an angry person for a really long time. But Charlie kept going to church, kept seeking God. He kept walking in community. He served the poor. He was actually arrested for protesting nuclear weapons. And he would say that midway through his life — I think he was even in his fifties or sixties — God did some really profoundly healing work in him that allowed him to forgive family members who had harmed him in a profound way. And that he now experiences the love and kindness of God in a more profound way than he ever has.
So he’s someone I look at and think: he just — and he lost a wife to cancer. He has suffered. He went through a long middle, like we all do, where he’s just working and doing life. And he is not perfect, but he just has the joy of the Lord. He believes this stuff. He’s bet his life on the gospel. And he’s getting older now. He’s lost close friends. And he is truly and genuinely looking forward to heaven.
And he prays for me and for my children all the time. He constantly texts us that he’s praying for us. He’s not a monk. He’s remarried. But he has, in the same way as these desert fathers and mothers, these rhythms and habits of prayer woven into his life that he’s just kept at for years and years and years. It’s not like every moment of his Christian life has been abundant and spiritual — it’s like the cumulative effect of a lifetime has made him a person of incandescent joy.
And my kids, who are teenagers, there’s just hardly anyone in this world they would rather be around. He doesn’t live in our town anymore, but they just love him and look up to him. Teenagers don’t often love to hang out with seventy-year-olds. But when someone loves you, and someone has lived their life in a way that is honest and joyful and rooted — he is so rooted, man. He lives within twenty miles of the house he was born in. And there is this abundance and fruitfulness that people are drawn to.
Mark Labberton: It’s a wonderful story. There’s a quality of patience toward ourselves, toward God, and toward others around us that’s part of this resilience. And I just wondered if you could reflect a bit on that.
Part of the difficulty of living in this space and being resilient is that we are understandably impatient — and I’m not meaning that just in the cheap sense of wanting something instantaneously. I’m meaning even over long chapters. I think of, for example, a person in my own life — in parallel with Charlie — a woman that I knew for many, many years who has now passed away. Her name was Hilda. And Hilda was a long-road person. She never married. She led a very deeply devotional life. But what she mostly did was lead a life of encouragement. That was her primary spiritual gift — whether in her professional workplace or in relationships — this incredible sense of joy and patience for God.
And the heart of that for me, as she would tell her story, was this: she had been praying every day, since the time she herself had become a Christian, for the conversion of her father. And she prayed for him every day for fifty-eight years — through all of the ups and downs and ins and outs of his life. And sure enough, fifty-eight years later, her father — not in any direct way connected to her efforts — had this amazing conversion where suddenly God was just present to him in a way that he couldn’t undo. And when Hilda told me this news and we wept together over what it all meant — to me it was in part a story of Hilda’s willingness to be patient, built into her resilience in just that way.
And that’s again one of the challenges of the book that I think is so rich: it is a call to a deeper, clearer, longer, harder road that is both personal and communal. To turn to the communal part for a moment — as a priest in the Anglican church, how does this book relate to community?
Tish Harrison Warren: Well, one of the things I want to say a little more about is patience, and then I will try to pull it back around to answer your question.
I just do not think we talk about patience enough in the church, especially the American church. I think because patience has been used to justify injustice in the past — I mean, very famously, “Letter from Birmingham Jail” pushes back hard against that kind of patience, and it can absolutely be abused that way. But I think the combination of factors is: it’s been misused; we live in a consumeristic society where patience doesn’t fit well; impatience is what keeps you buying things, trying to fix things, trying to make things faster. Patience doesn’t make anybody any money. And then I think the actual speed and rhythm of our life builds in us impatience. When I look back at these desert fathers and mothers, they talk about patience all the time. The idea that you would pray for something or struggle with a particular sin for decades and decades and just keep going, keep praying, keep struggling — that’s normative. It’s just expected. And I don’t know that we give people that long of a view. I don’t think, in discipleship, we prepare young people to be that patient.
But to come back to your point about community: one of the things I learned in the process of trying to figure out how to keep going — and that I don’t think I even realized until after the book was done and I was editing it — is how much I end up talking about community in the book. And I really don’t think we can be resilient as individuals very well. I think resilience requires community. The way we foster resilience and perseverance is collectively, together with one another — and with the community of the historic church. I feel like I’m in community with Christians who had to wait their whole lives for things. I’m in community with these desert fathers and mothers.
And so I think all of this points to hope. Hope is what enables patience. It’s not that here and now is all we have, or that the next political cycle is what Christians are focused on. We’re focused on a much longer work of God — an eternal work of God, God setting things right — but also on the planting and building and working for things that we won’t see the fruition of, that we’re hoping will make the church a better place for our grandchildren or great-grandchildren, that will make things better for generations to come. But that is such a long view. It’s small repair. It’s seeking healthy churches. It’s really slow institutional change. It’s disappointing in the present, and it’s always two steps forward, one step back.
I worry that when we have a society where we want the hot take, we’re just never cultivating the long view that is really, really necessary.
And I’ll say this: in the book I talk about how we have to carry hope together. We actually aren’t able to get to a place of hope alone. We do this, of course, through our liturgy and through gathered worship. But I quote Curt Thompson, the psychiatrist, in the book, who says the human brain is capable of doing really hard things for a long period of time — but it is not capable of doing it alone. It is only capable of that when it does not have to do those hard things by itself. We need other humans that we are deeply emotionally connected to, to help us carry hope.
Mark Labberton: And I think this book is an example of your finding some of those people who have been walking with us for nearly two millennia — who have modelled the long road and, in their own story, very specifically located in their literal cell. And that journey continues even today, even in the richness of these reflections.
I really hope, Tish, that this book gets a wide reading, because it deserves it. It’s getting at, at times, almost the molecular qualities of what it takes to be in the long journey of faith. But it also holds this much larger narrative of hope — a God who is carefully and patiently working out his will in a world that is anything but immediately responsive.
I remember, soon after I became a Christian in college, being in various Bible studies where people would talk about struggling with their prayer life. And I understood what that meant, but what it looked like was people struggling with simply remaining in the cell — deliberately and consciously. And I thought: I do not want to be the age that I am now, seventy-three, and still be struggling with whether or not I’m going to have a prayer life. Somewhere early, it set in my heart that this is a work that has to begin now, and it has to be daily lived out over the long haul — never completely, never fully, never adequately. But it has been that work. And I feel like in addition to the challenges of this book, it was also an encouragement, because it felt very much like: yes, this is that road. I know this road that’s being described. And it is as difficult, as circuitous, as disappointing and confusing at times as it can be. And it is nevertheless a road of hope. So thank you for both of those dimensions — and for so much more.
Tish Harrison Warren: Thank you. Thank you for your wisdom and leadership over the years.
